Black Alibi (18 page)

“Oh no, no bearing at all,” agreed Manning treacherously. “
Except to show that it was a man who waylaid her here on this corner
. She would not have rouged her lips for a quadruped, I believe?”

Robles gave his arms a slight flip at his sides, said in an heroically restrained voice to those immediately around him, but excluding Manning as though he weren’t there: “That again. What did I do to deserve this hornet buzzing in my ears? Mendez. Gipriano. Stand one on each side of him. Each of you take an arm. Yes, like that. Now walk him over to that cab over there, put him in it, and see that it takes him back wherever it is he came from.”

Robles wasn’t kidding. He was a little too white at the corners of the eyes and mouth to have been anything but serious. It might have been, partly, the early hour of the day.

Neither, for that matter, was Manning. “Your theory must be pretty shaky,” he said witheringly, “if it can’t stand a little honest difference of opinion. What’s the matter, afraid it’ll fall down flat. Take your hands off me. This is a public street. I’m entitled to stand here as long as I want.”

It could very easily have been the starting point of actual ill-feeling, bad blood between them. Fortunately, an interruption occurred just then which took everyone’s mind off all lesser matters.

There was a great commotion and fanfare at the curb, and the
jefe de policia
himself stepped down from a breath-taking Bugatti, one of the last to be imported before the war. Everyone fell silent, drew himself up where he stood at stiff attention, as he approached surrounded by a small group of subordinates.

He was a short, wiry clerical-looking man, with an aggressive manner and a voluminous, resonant voice that must have been ideal for addressing large gatherings. He cast only the briefest of glances at the vestiges remaining on wall and ground, concentrated on the men before him instead. He stood there glittering balefully through his spectacles at them, like an infuriated ,owl blinking in the sunlight.

“You are in charge here, inspector?” he thundered after a dramatic pause.

“
Si, excelencia
,” Robles quailed in a small voice.

“How many more times is this going to happen? This fiend must be exterminated! I want its carcass shown to me within the next twenty-four hours, is that clear?” He included the others, turning his head to take them in. “Is that clear to all of you? The mayor and the
ayuntamiento
are showing concern, are having a reward posted to the general public, independent of your efforts. It is a reflection on my department. There is already a city-wide panic brewing. The tourist season is about to begin. This can do incalculable harm, people will avoid coming here!”

He strode back to the Bugatti, delivered the postscript from there. “There should be nothing complicated about this matter! If one animal has a better head on it than the best heads we have on the police force, then it is time there was a general reorganization, from head to foot!”

Robles sat at his desk dismally scanning a specimen of one of the municipal council’s new posters, fresh from the printer’s. It was so large it curled over the edge of the desk at both sides. It was a vivid yellow, and dozens like it were going up on every advertisement kiosk, signboard, and vacant wall in town.

At the top, in beetling black betters, it had: AVISO AL PUBLICO. Then numerous lines of fine print. Then at last, toward the lower right-hand corner, again in heavier type: $1,000 REWARD.

Manning knew, by the very fact that he was being allowed to remain there in the office while gobles struggled with himself, that the batter intended eventually to give in.

“I still say I do not agree with you,” Robles said, thumping the desk despairingly. “But when my official position, my job itself, is involved, I am forced to give any possibility a trial, even though it goes against my own beliefs. I cannot afford to pass anything by.”

“Hold on a minute,” Manning said quickly. “I’m not making an accusation, you understand? I haven’t any proof against the man, none whatever. There’s only this one incriminating circumstance involved: I’ve been inquiring around, here, there, the next place; privately, on my own account, you understand; and I find he has been in the habit of coming in to the city on overnight visits. Every now and then, every so often, at irregular intervals.”

“There is nothing criminal in that. Hundreds of people come into the city every day and night, just as hundreds go out again.”

“I agree with you,” Manning said mildly. “Some have fixed days for it. Every Saturday night, say. Or every Sunday. Or twice a week, regularly. As the case may be. Then there are others who come in haphazardly, as hedoes. Just whenever the impulse hits them. As you say, there is nothing particularly incriminating in either of those habitudes.”

“Well then?”

“Just idly, let me give you the three last haphazard dates on which he repaired to the city. They are authentic, you can rely on them; I obtained them from various disinterested sources: bus drivers on the line that goes out that way, cantina-keepers, and the bike. See if they interest you.”

Robles looked down at the poster staring him in the face, kept tapping his fingers rotatingly on the edge of it, with a moody sort of thoughtfubness.

Manning took out a scrap envelope, scanned the back of it. “May the fourteenth—”

Robles’ eyes went up from the poster before him.

“May the twenty-sixth—”

Robles’ head went up, as his neck stiffened.

“June the eighth—”

Robles’ whole body went up, to a standing position before his desk chair. Then leaning over, he brought the flat of his hand crashingly down on the desk, left it there for a long moment.

“Teresa Delgado met death on the night of May fourteenth. Conchita Contreras came to her end on the night of May twenty-sixth. The girl nicknamed Clo-Clo was found at daybreak on June the ninth.” He glowered at the American. “Once, you would call a coincidence. Twice, you would call suspicious. But three times, what would you call that?”

“I’m not good at naming things,” was all Manning said quietly.

Robles thumbed the lever of the voice conveyor on his desk.

“Bring me in Juan Cardozo, foreman of the ranch at Las Cruces. It’s about fifty kilometers out, on the overland road. Just follow that and you’ll come to it. No charges, just wanted for questioning.”

He was burned a deep mahogany from year-around exposure to the sun. He had come in just as they found him: blue cotton work shirt open at the neck, a sort of poncho arrangement slung over one shoulder, corduroy pants, the embossed silver belt of the typical riding man about his middle, and a shapeless felt hat, wavy-brimmed from being continually soaked down and allowed to dry out again, probably right on his head.

He had a small but very stiff-haired black mustache. Occasionally, during the long hours it went on, they bet him smoke. As if to bet him remember what comfort and ease were bike after all this time.The implication being he could have them back again at will, if he would only admit the worst about himself. Whenever they did let him smoke, he would take a paper from his pocket and slowly, lovingly roll one for himself. It was almost a pleasure to watch him at it, he was so deft, so artistic about it.

“I found it when I was making my rounds on horseback one day,” he was saying when Manning slipped unobtrusively into the room behind all their backs. Strictly speaking, he had no business there. But then, strictly speaking, they had no business holding the man Cardozo there, either. Not as yet.

“Its mother had been killed, and it was shivering there by the body. It was just a little mite then, a cub, coal black. I picked it up and took it back with me to the ranch house and kept it there. For a while we kept it right in the house, bike a kitten. Then when it got a little bigger, I knocked together a sort of pen for it outside and kept it in that. Then one day senor here happened to come out, and he saw it; he asked me if he could borrow it for twentyfive pesos, he wanted to have a lady show it off in her car with her.”

“Who fed it?” Robles wanted to know in a dangerously minor key.

“I did.”

“It knew you, then?”

“
Claro
. Any animal knows the one that feeds it.”

“You spoke to it when you fed it?”

“Sure. Like you do, you know.”

“You had a name for it?”

“
Negrote
.” * [The big black one.]

“In other words, it knew you, it was familiar with you. You could approach it more easily than anyone else, isn’t that true?”

The ranchman sensed where he was being led. He shifted uneasily. “Anyone could approach it. All of us out there. The senor had no trouble, bringing it in to town—”

“Let us go back to dates, again,” Robles said disarmingly. “You have admitted you were in the city all night the night of the fourteenth of May.”

“I have already told you where I was. At the Cantina Estrella de Media Noche. Ask all the bunch who goes there; Hipobito, Benito Doinguez, they all saw me—”

“We have already, never fear,” Robles said with the placidity of an idol. “There is no clock in the cantina. They saw you, yes; early in the evening. But then after, for instance?”

“After it closed, I was where one always is after a cantina closes: lying with my back propped up against a wall, outside in the street somewhere.”

Robles scratched his ear perplexedly, as though at a boss, not knowing what question to ask next. A completely false impression, Manning knew, watching him from the background. “Let us leave the night of the fourteenth, it seems to be getting us nowhere. On the twenty-sixth, you say—”

Cardozo showed his teeth around at them. “I have already told you that too. They will be charging me for three visits, instead of one. Very well, I was at the house run by Dona Sara—”

“Tell me, were you planning to elope with one of the girls there?”

“The
comandante
is joking. One does not elope with—”

“The
comandante
is not joking,” Robles assured him icily. “Why then were you seen to have a riata * [A looped rope. A lasso.] coiled about your waist the night you visited the house of Dona Sara?”

Cardozo’s jaw fluctuated up and down, but all that came from his mouth were two meaningless pronouns. “I—I—”

But Robles hadn’t waited. He was asking them faster now. “Why then did you have pieces of raw meat in a bag with you the night you were at the cantina? Whom were you expecting to feed? Yourself?”

“No, I—I—”

“And what became of that raw meat? You had it no longer when you boarded the morning bus for Las Gruces. And what became of the riata? You had that no longer, either, when you made the return trip.”

“The riata—somebody in the house of Dona Sara must have stolen it—they do that in those places, anything of any value. The meat—maybe some dog or cat came along while I was sleeping on the sidewalk outside the cantina—”

“And what did you bring those things along for? Was it because you had something staked Out, somewhere here in the city, that you wished to lead about with you for a while? Was it?
Contesta!
[Answer!]” His voice exploded. “Was it?”

Manning thought he had never before seen such a look of dawning fear and horror on anyone’s face as began to peer out on Cardozo’s. “I—I—oh, wait, no, don’t think that! I did, I admit it, I did hope to save Negrote alive. I thought perhaps I might come across him just by chance, throw him the meat, sling the riata over him, find some way of getting him back to the
estancia
with me. It was just an idle impulse, a stupid thought that came to me— But not what you mean! Not what you are trying to say!” He looked from face to face, pleadingly. “Senores, what do you want with me? I know, I have known for hours past. I have not said so, you have not said so either. I have been in town other nights, besides the three you mention. Why don’t you speak of them?”

“Very well,” Robles said accommodatingly, “we shall.” He consulted something. “You were in on the twentieth of May,
por ejemplo
.”

“Yes, yes!” Cardozo nodded almost avidly.

“Did you have a riata with you that night? Raw meat that night?”

The back of answer was the answer.

“You were in on the thirty-first. Did you then, either?”

Cardozo shivered a little, and his head went over, as though he were peering closely at something out before his feet.

“Only on the nights on which
something happened
in this city did you come provided with the rather curious articles we have mentioned. Not on the others.”

The man in the middle of all of them leaped to his feet suddenly. Restraining hands were immediately laid on him, but he stood there erect, facing his tormentors. Even though he was shivering spasmodically, there was a sort of innate dignity pulsing from him. Even Manning, the outlander, could feel it. For a moment it made of them, not policemen around a suspect; just men around another man. “I have killed, yes. I spent two years in jail for it, back in my native
tierra
. It was over a woman, any man would have killed. But not this way! One kills in revenge, to right a wrong. How can one be revenged on or wronged by individuals one did not even know existed; one never saw in all his life before? Or one kills to rob. At beast some do. What other reason is there to kill?”

Manning had taken a small file out of his pocket, he was shaping a thumbnail with it while’ he lounged indolently back against the door. “One sometimes kills for the love of it,” he remarked unexpectedly.

Their heads all turned to look around at him. He, in turn, had taken his eyes off the file for a moment. Something went wrong. He started violently, seized the fleshy bulge at the bottom of his thumb, bent over it, swearing softly in English. The file dropped with a plink.

He came forward into the bight, holding the self-inflicted wound, as if to examine it better. Yet he went on completing the remark he had made just before the accident happened. “For the love of it, for its own sake, because they like the sight of blood. Because it does something to them.”