Black Alibi (17 page)

“Hey,
chica
, how about a little spin with me?” Yes, she’d been right, the voice was that of a youth, and slightly nervous at its own daring under the man-about-town nonchalance it tried so hard to assume.

She had already taken a step over toward him to parley, both out of long habit and because of the special circumstances involved in this instance, before she realized what she was doing. She jolted to a sudden halt again.

“Wait a minute, what color is that car? It books to me—”

“It’s black,” he said proudly. “Some beauty, eh?”

“Get outta here!” she shrieked in sudden unreasoning panic. “Get away from me with that thing!
Ay, dios mio
, don’t come near me with it!” She fled full tilt down the street as if pursued by demons.

“It’s an Hispano,” he cabled after her in high dudgeon. She looked back to make sure he wasn’t coming after her in it. He was standing there by it, booking from her to it, and from it to her, in outraged pride of ownership. He even backed one arm at her in resentment. She had evidently wounded him in a very sensitive spot.

She kept running, to get away even from the very vicinity of the thing. She didn’t stop for almost a block, tapering off finally to a bedraggled scamper simply because she was completely out of breath. What a close shave that had been! The thing would have probably telescoped itself into a wall and burned her alive inside of five minutes after she’d gotten in.

Her stockings were loosening from her flight, and she had to bend over and tug them up. Her jacket and the blouse under it were all awry too, and she had to straighten them. Then she continued at a tottering walk, still panting from her efforts.

That got her home finally. That saw her the rest of the way to the shack. It was a one-story, two-room cabin of adobe bricks covered with plaster, and roofed over with broken tiles, out where the buildings were beginning to thin out, the land wasn’t worth much, and nobody was exactly sure who owned it. It had a small patch of open ground out in front, with sunflowers struggling up through the discarded gasoline cans and broken water jugs, and usually the old bady’s wash strung out. It was home. She liked it. She liked to come back to it. It was what she sat drinking at bars for. It was what she brought home a hundred and fifty pesos—or a peso and fifty centavos—to. She didn’t take the money from here elsewhere, she brought it from elsewhere here. That showed where it ranked in her favor. Sure, they’d have a better one someday a little farther out, but the idea, the system, would be the same.

Their mongrel yard dog reared belatedly up from the ground at her passage and gave its usual vociferous, craven bark, while remaining prudently at a distance. “Quiet, Conejo, it’s me,” she said. Then it went to the other extreme of tail pumping and getting in her way until she had gotten inside and closed the door on it.

She had to pick her way among the pallets on the floor, but she knew where most of them were. The old lady always left a path clear for her from the door over to her cot. Once in a while she stepped on a hand, but that was because the sleeper had carelessly shifted position after the general retirement.

One of the younger kids had pre-empted her cot, she found when she got over to it. She didn’t mind if they did that, until she was ready to use it herself. She woke it, remonstrated in an undertone: “Get off, now,
palomita
. I’m back. Go on, get down where you belong.” The kid sidled off to the floor, went ahead sleeping. Clo-Clo sat down in its place, took off her shoes.

She stretched luxuriantly, arms high overhead, yawned, sighed blissfully. Gee it was good to be back here, to have the whole thing over with. She sat inertly slumped over there for a moment or two, half asleep already although still upright from the waist, while a jumbled kaleidoscope of the whole night fanned through her dimming mind.

“You’d like it in Copenhague, I’d like to take you out of this … First you’re here, then you’re not here … Watch your manners in here, take the one on the end, none of that smoke-ring stuff, understand? … Papa, the car is waiting outside, what’bb I tell Elena! … Five more minutes, I’m closing up… Hey,
chica
, how about a spin with me? It’s an Hispano …”

One hundred and fifty pesos. If there’d only be a few more nights like this, she could cut it out, chuck the whole thing overboard. She shrugged off her jacket, bet it fall down behind her. The cot gave a jolting creak. Suddenly she was erect, awake, appalled. Her hands were pressed flat against the center hollow of her bosom.

Gone!

She gave a choked exclamation that carried through the open doorway into the next room. Her mother stirred in there, cabled drowsily in: “You back, Gabriebita? What’s the matter, have you been hurt?” They didn’t call her Clo-Clo here, they didn’t even know that was her name.

She found her shoes again. She was too stunned even to cry, to make any further sound. It was a solar-plexus impact. All she could do was breathe heavily, bike when she’d finished running a little while ago—

That was it! That run from that car. That was when it must have happened. That was the only time she’d moved fast all night; fast enough to lose it, anyway. Her stockings had come down, her blouse had shifted around a little. It must have worked its way up over the neckbine and fallen out.

She had the outer door open now. No four of spades could have stopped her, no black cat, no black car. Nothing now. Money, security, that was the strongest impulse; that was stronger even than fear of death. Her mother’s voice sounded again, just before she got the door closed. “Are you going out again, my daughter? Take care of yourself, it’s so bate—”

“Just for a minute. Go back to sleep, I’ll be right back,” she answered inattentively. The breadwinner had no time for fear or explanations; let her dependents do the worrying for her, this was her problem and she had to solve it alone.

She was going back now toward the inner city, fast, all weariness postponed. Walking as though it were three in the afternoon. Her mind was grappling with it. She had a good mind; she would have had, if it had been trained at all. “I didn’t lose it when I went spinning around the table there at the Tabarin. I know I didn’t, because I felt for it after I left, and it was still in. I didn’t lose it sitting with La Bruja; her hands were on the cards, didn’t come near me. It was when I ran from that accursed car; then and then only.”

She knew, fortunately, just about where that was. He’d come up to her just past Retiro, and she’d run all the rest of the block, up to the next crossing at San Marco. It was somewhere along that stretch, on the right-hand side of Justicia.

Here. It began from here on. She slackened, began a pendulum-like advance along the nightblue shadowed sidewalk, swinging from curbing to building base, from building base to curbing, head rigidly inclined. Every unevenness, every slight flaw in the paving blocks, that cast a deeper shadow than the rest of the surface, she examined by bending still further down over, or even testing with the tips of her fingers.

Minutes went by. The city slept, the night brooded, the broomlike shuffle of her feet, back and forth, and forth and back, was the only sound there was.

The curbing veered in suddenly, thrust a drop under her feet. She looked up with aching, stiff neck. Already? Had she reached the other end already? Yes, here, here was where the car had stopped, and played its lights upon her.

Maybe
he’d
found it. But he hadn’t come after her. He’d stood there by the car a minute, and then gotten in and driven off. And at this hour hardly anyone was about, hardly anyone was likely to have passed by here since. It must be still someplace around, it must be. Until daylight, until the first early risers were on the streets, it would still lie where it had fallen. She wouldn’t desist, she wouldn’t stop booking until she’d found it.

She’d made one complete round trip to the San Marco corner and back again, when hope finally gave up the ghost. When she finally had to admit that it was useless booking any more, that if it had been there she would already have found it two or three times over. She wavered helplessly about there on the sidewalk awhile, crumbling inside. Then the tears came. Hot, bitter tears, of a wrenching intensity that those who lived safely could never know.

She went over to the wall, there close by the corner, and pressed her face against it, under the overhanging splint of her arm, heels out behind her and clear of the ground, and with her other hand she beat the counterpoint to her strangled sobs against the heartless, unyielding, prickling stones.

The whole night for nothing. All those smiles, all that magnetic current, all those kilowatts of personality consumed, with nothing to show for them.

The sobs stopped first. Then the intolerable anguished pounding of her palm slowed to little pats, died away at last. She tried to console herself as best she could. It had been something for nothing. Now she was no worse off, at least, than she had been before she had received it. It wouldn’t work. “It was mine,” she said smotheredly against the wall. “I had it. Why should it be taken away from me again?”

She flung her shoulder around in defiance, turned at last to face the other way, still propped against the wall. She stared in glowering dullness out at nothing. The night owed her a return. She’d get a little something back, no matter how fractional a part of her boss. She’d stand here until she did. She wouldn’t go home empty-handed. The fatal middle-class virtue of thrift. Something to show for it, if it was only a half-peso piece, only a cadged cigarette. She wouldn’t leave this spot until she did.

Justicia had been cut ruthlessly through a decrepit, labyrinthine part of the town, on the bias. All the mobdering little lanes and abbeys that opened out upon it, opened as a result not rectangularly but sbantwise. At the corner where she stood, San Marco, running in to join the newer thoroughfare, made an angle so acute it was little better than a fifteen-degree incision. The corner of this wall she lounged against was needlepointed; San Marco was, not around the corner from her, but directly behind her back, on the other side of the double-flanged well.

Now as she stood there in the blue hour, in the death watch of the night, defiantly determined Upon her recompense. the soft crush of a foot upon loose-packed earth, upon imperfectly bedded small stones, reached her from around this projection, from behind her own back. Somebody’ was coming along there, along the unpaved margin of San Marco, about to turn this razor corner and happen upon her.

Somebody, and no matter who it was, she wanted something of the night, she would not let him by without exacting tribute, to repair her loss and assuage her shattered self-esteem. She dried her eyes by stabbing a knuckle into them, in quick succession. She opened her bag and started to redden her mouth with flurried urgency, the smile of gamin friendliness with which she intended to halt him in another moment already turning up its corners even as she did so, for the loose top layer of tiny stones and gravel was already shifting in
sight of her
, out there beyond the knifelike corner, like sluggish water riding outwards from an impact still unseen, the cause of it still hidden for a moment more.

In another instant they would be face to face, eye to eye. She could already have reached her hand explorativeby backward around the stone screen and touched him as he sidled up.

The lipstick dipped. Her smile was ready now. She turned it up toward the night, eyes half lidded with expectancy.

They had taken her away by the time Manning arrived, at seven that same morning, in a taxi. The flatiron corner of San Marco and Justicia looked dainty in early-morning water colors: peach pink and pastel blue. Pink sunlight in the faces of the men standing around, and bight-blue shadows on the ground behind them.

There was one other color, on the wall on the Justicia side: as though somebody had been careless with some kind of overripe fruit.

There weren’t many people around. A country Indian on his way to early market with a basket of persimmons on his head seemed to have become permanently rooted to one particular spot on his way past, stood there mouth agape in incomprehension, poised to go on but forgetting to. On the opposite sidewalk a street sweeper also stood looking on, resting on his broom of twigs. Occasionally he would make a couple of passes with it, then stop and look on some more. On a third-floor balcony on that same side a plump woman had come out to watch, but had brought her hairbrush with her and continued stroking her bong black glossy hair while she did so. That was about all; the rest were all those whose business it was to be there.

Manning had not only not been informed this time, but could even tell he was somewhat
persona non grata
when he got out of the cab and joined them. Robles glanced up, greeted him uncordially with: “You again? We have work to do here. Please, no more suggestions from the sidelines, if you don’t mind!” And then he added, “What are you, a mind reader? How did you know?”

“It’s all over town already. The milkman told the
mozo
that brings my morning coffee to me from across the street, and the
mozo
told me. Who was it this time?”

“An habitué of the cafés known as Clo-Clo A lady of the evening, poor creature. Mendez here knew her. Didn’t you, Mendez?”

Mendez dropped his eyelids disclaimingly. “Only in the line of duty.”

Manning had caught sight of several small objects awaiting removal, which had been placed, meanwhile, on a sheet of newspaper spread out on top of an opened campstool. “Where does the lipstick come in?” he asked.

“It was lying on the ground close beside her body. It fell out of her handbag, I suppose, in the course of the death struggle.”

Manning took a while. Then finally he asked, “WThat else fell out?”

“Nothing else fell out.”

“Was the bag open or closed when it was found?”

Robles was fair enough—and incautious enough—to hold one finger up for the benefit of those around him. “Ah. He has made a good point there, the American. The bag was still closed when we found it. Therefore, it is true that the lipstick could not have fallen out, she must have removed it herself.” He waved his hand blandly. “However, it is just a detail, it has no bearing on the matter one way or the other.”