Black Alibi (12 page)

She put her hands to her throat, as if to stop it outwardly, if she couldn’t inwardly. They were powerless too. A second one was wrenched from her against her will. “Hurry up! Where are you—?” It vibrated in the cemetery stillness like a thrumming knife blade, went winging over the wall into the night beyond.

In the redoubled silence that followed she thought she heard a sound. Nothing definite, like that car door before, or even the chirp of the horn preceding that. Something less easily identifiable, like a—a
pad
. Over somewhere on the other side of the wall, not in here where she was. It must have been simply some leaf, or small cluster of leaves, that had fallen to the ground with a splat. And yet, it hadn’t been quite like that either. It had been both firmer and at the same time softer; less scratchy, more resilient. Almost like a velvety tread, the merest silkiest whisper of a tread, except that a tread is continuous, and this was an isolated fragment of one, cast into notice by some uncertainty or flux of the ground being trodden upon. That, at least, was what it could have been taken for, what it bore a resemblance to most. But was it anything at all? The sodden fall of a kernel or heavy burr, or a piece of mortar loosened from the wall surface by his recent gymnastic efforts, could have caused it as well.

Alertness was ebbing again, as nothing followed for a moment or two.

Then a twig snapped. The smallest of small twigs. Little better than a membrane. Still over there on the outside, not in here.

The wind was from behind her, blowing outward across the wall, as it had been all along. Not strong; of an impetus enough only to sway dangling leaves a little, to carry scents from one part to another. To carry the scent of the many dead over the wall and beyond. The many dead, and the one living. But what nostrils could detect such a thing? What senses were keen en—?

There was a huff. The sound of hot body breath being blown against a surface that acted upon it as a sort of sounding board. As if nostrils were being pointed searchingly against the wall. But distended vents of nostrils, tubes of sonorousness.

There was something
living
near her. It was a feeling, a surety, a knowledge, that grew on her without any further audible proof to confirm it. Every nerve in her body, every hair follicle in her head, told her so. And the longer the silence continued, the stronger the impression grew. As though, while she held her breath, listening through, something else was bated near her, listening also. More than just listening with ear. Identifying her with rippling pores of acuteness. Projected waves of awareness, magnetized with some sort of powerful, leashed dynamism, reached her through the bulky stone barrier. Something, someone, was present there, hidden from sight on the other side of it. Stalking her in complete immobility, so to speak.

Her screams, just now, had drawn something to her. It couldn’t be a human being, it was too stealthy. A dog, perhaps? But a dog would bark or at least growl its distrust. This thing was still. fleadlily still, venomously still.

She couldn’t stand the prolonged tension any longer. A tension not alone generated from her, but that was a two-way current, flowing both to and from her. “Is that you?” she quavered. “Why are you so still?”

She knew it couldn’t be. He would have come back in the car. Or if not, there would at least have been the sound of hurrying footsteps, unconcealed, the drag of a ladder, a hail to her.

There was a rasping, along the outer side of the wall, in answer to her voice. A sandpapery friction, directly abreast of where she cowered. The sound—the sound that a cat sometimes produces when it tries its claws on something. Following it an instant later, she could detect a vibration of the ground, communicated through to where she was As though something, some heavy body, had dropped heavily. Had flung itself up first, and then dropped frustratedly back again.

“Who is it?” she cried sharply. “Who’s there?”

A spring is soundless, until it meets its objective, and yet somehow she knew that something had sprung. Some disturbance of the air told her. A moment later, in confirmation, somewhere over her there was a creak, as of wood being strained, a great rustling of leaves. And yet at the moment there was a lull in the wind, there was nothing to cause it.

Her eyes flew up to that bough that spanned the wall almost directly over her. It was thick, well rounded, heavy enough to bear—many things. Something had happened to it; it had altered. Dark as it was, she could see that a change had taken place in it. It had stood out straight until now, well clear of the top of the wall; it had been horizontal to the trunk. Now it was sloping downward, was far lower at its outer end, where her eyes couldn’t follow it, than in at the trunk. More than that, it was grazing the wall. It was emitting sound. It was tapping lightly against the top edge of the wall in vibration, at point of fulcrum; it was fluctuating noticeably, it was shivering under pressure. Something had hold of it—or was on it, clinging in delicate, wary, painful ascent, up and in toward the tree heart.

She couldn’t summon up any more voice. “Who is it?” she whispered hoarsely. She couldn’t tear herself away, turn and run as she wanted to. She was rooted there, hypnotized as in a nightmare, head straining back, staring up into the blackness over her, that was like something gathering itself to a head.

There hadn’t been anything to strike light up there before. The tree was shrouded by the other trees around it; the wall and the ground below’ were shrouded by all alike. The moon was there all along somewhere in the background ready to supply the kindling, but with nothing to receive it.

Now something did. Through the stirring, undulating masses of leaves that garnished the outer end of the bough where it vanished across the wall, something peered through at her, through and downward. Something faintly lucent, palely green, phosphorescent. Like an avid, remorseless eye, become visible by drawing to a head upon itself the unsuspected moon motes swimming invisibly in the darkness, and now aflame, sighted balefully down upon her through the covert of leaves.

Her mouth parted spasmodically, trying to give the last cry that there was already no time for. The death cry that was too late.

Manning arrived on the scene almost immediately afterward, this time. He had been with Robles when the flash reached the central
comandancia
, and came out in the same car with him.

A number of the official departmental cars that had preceded them were strung in a line along the outside of the wall. Three or four ladders, with policemen guarding their bases, were tilted to the wall as the shortest and easiest way of getting in and out. It had happened all the way around from the main entrance.

They tried to keep Manning out, as an unauthorized person, as he tried to clamber up the rungs of one of these at Robles’ heels. He grabbed the police inspector by the tail of his coat, hung on tight, refusing to be parted from him.

“He’s with me,” Robles said briefly.

On the inside of the wall there was a complement to each ladder, to give access to the ground. They turned and went down these backwards.

That whole immediate section of the cemetery had been turned into a grotesque charivari of portable, highpowered, icy-white lights slanted at cross-purposes to one another, whose thick beams were edged with violet. Around and about them were the occasional blue flares of photographic flashlights, the yellow bees of pocket lights flitting all over far and near, some of them momentarily playing up the inscription on a headstone as it sidled across it. Red cigarette and cigar embers would glow occasionally from some grave mound, where someone had sat down for a moment to rest or tie a shoelace or compare notes with somebody else. The place was a madhouse of swirling, irreverent activity.

At the foot of one of the ladders a grief-stunned youth in a belted cravenette topcoat, hatless and disheveled with shock, was being held up on his feet between a policeman and a man in plain clothes. He kept straining away from them, shoulders and head forward, toward a spot farther along at the base of the wall where the beams of several of the highpowered lights fell interlocked in a pool, terrible in its dazzling clarity. There was sacking spread there. His sobs kept coming, low and pulsing, from his stomach. You could see it go in and out each time one sounded. His face was a white mask that didn’t move any more.

“
El novio
,” one of the men explained in answer to Robles’ inquiry in passing. The sweetheart.

Some martinet near by snapped, “Shut that man up. Take him out of here or else give him something to keep him quiet! He only makes it worse.”

Manning, who had lingered behind a moment watching him, hurried to rejoin Robles. Robles was at the sacking, standing there motionless. The American arrived just at the wrong time.

It was awful, even worse than the first one had been. That had been given some semblance of concealment and classic repose at the morgue. This was madness, strewn upon the ground. Manning stepped hastily backward out of the glare and furtively wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Robles stared down, his face impassive but sweating a little at the temples. He did something with his little finger, and it was hidden again.

The pertinent details were being poured into his ear by one of his men, standing just outside the radius of light. He seemed not to be listening at all. Only one thing about him moved, his eyes. They took in everything, darting about restlessly: over the ground, up the trunk of the death tree, out along the bough, then down again along the wall, boxing in the setting in a complete little square.

He spoke at last. “Eyewitnesses—none, you say. Very well then, secondary witnesses.”

A shifty-eyed man in his thirties stepped forward into the light. “Juan Gomez, thirty-six Ayenida Betancourt,” Robles’ second reeled off in the background.

“—luckily he came back with me. He didn’t want to trust the ladder out of his sight, I guess. Anyway when we got back here, it was strangely quiet. I called to her, and she didn’t answer any more. I put the ladder to the wall and started over, to see what had happened to her. I thought maybe somebody else had gotten her out during my absence. Before I’d even gotten down on the inside, I heard him give a yell out there on his side. He’d already found some bloodstained marks or tracks on the outside of the wall—”

Robles seemed not to have been listening. All he said was, “You’ll be required to appear at the inquest. And give us your right name before you leave here tonight, Senor Gomez.”

“But I’m a family man—”

“Where you were visiting is none of our business. You were out late in your car, that will be sufficient. Next.”

The gateman was shoved forward into the light, spoke his piece, relegated to the outer darkness again.

“—and I thought she’d left already. I’d seen some woman go by, all in black, and, well my eyes aren’t so good any more, especially in the twilight. So I gave the warning signal, and locked up. They’re supposed to know at what time the grounds close—”

Again Robles acted as though he hadn’t heard a word. His head hadn’t once turned toward the speaker.

Distant sounds, of men calling to one another from various remote parts of the grounds, attracted his attention. He turned his head away from what lay before him on the ground for the first time, spoke sharply to one of the underlings nearest him. “What are they doing out there? Call them back, the fools. It’s not in here any more, they’re just wasting their time.”

“But the trees are quite thick in places, especially toward the center,” remonstrated the subordinate. “And this wall which completely encloses it would act as an effective pen. On the east side it’s even higher than here and spiked with broken bottle glass

“Haven’t you eyes? You were all here half an hour before I was. Anyone can see that it got out again as it got in.”

Manning turned toward him in time to see him, crouch down close to the gruesome litter, remove some indeterminate, blood-caked, boat-shaped object adhering to the remains themselves. He straightened again, transferred it to a clean piece of white paper. A tiny stem could now be seen to project from one end of it. Even yet it was hard to tell what it was, without his word of explanation. Its patina disguised it.

“A leaf,” he rapped out, in the sudden attentive silence that had fallen. “This was originally a leaf. One of God’s green leaves, before it became encrusted with death matter. There are dozens of them, clinging all over her, like feathers to a halfplucked fowl. They don’t fall this time of the year. They were not on the ground originally.” His eyes flicked to the bough above. “They were shaken down upon her. It dropped down upon her bodily, from up there, in a shower of leaves. Her cries must have attracted it to her as it prowled the outside of the wall. Then, the carnage perpetrated, it sprang up to the bough again, crossed over the top of the wall, and returned whence it had come. Where are your eyes? What were’ you doing here while you were waiting for me? A glass.” It was handed to him and he traced it along the contour of the trunk, at a distance close enough to obtain a clear focus. “Keep your heads out of the light, stand over on the side. Now. Do you see? It is plain enough for you? You detect the livid gashes on the bark from its claws? They are deepest at the top, each one; they are full punctures there, tapering off to a mere shallow scratch at the bottom. That means they were made by the beast
going up
. Its claws dug in to obtain a hold, slipped slightly downward each time with its bodily weight, then were transferred to the next claw hold higher up, until it had reached the bough. Even so, it probably made its ascent almost more quickly than the eye could follow—but the traces of it do not vanish so swiftly, fortunately. Get them on your negatives.” And as he handed back the borrowed glass, he added disgustedly: “You should really be provided with alms bowls and sticks and sent to join the other blind on the benches around the Plaza Mayor.”

Manning knew he was there only by sufferance, should have kept his mouth shut. But he couldn’t resist breaking in scathingly: “And in the face of that, you still think it’s a jaguar?”