Black Alibi (19 page)

He uncapped his protective hand. A skin tear produced by the point of the file was revealed, not very serious, but lavishly blooded, as such things often are. It even dripped down free off his outpoised hand, which he had inadvertently spaded almost under Cardozo’s nose, to keep from staining his own cuff with it.

Cardozo blinked twice, as one does in discomfort. Then he sidled his face sidewise, in uncontrollable repugnance at the bleeding wound’s almost contact-point proximity.

Nobody said anything; they understood.

Robles let out a faintly discernible sigh after a moment. “Take him outside,” he said. “We’ll continue later.” And to somebody else, as the door closed, “See if you can find some alcohol for the _norteno’s finger—”

“It was worth it,” Manning said, blowing on it and wringing it out. “What are you going to do now, turn him loose?”

“Continue to hold him in custody,” Robles said vindictively. “Give your theory rope, and rope, and ropeuntil it strangles itself!”

“I don’t get you.”

Robles smiled bleakly. “If these barbarities mysteriously cease to occur while he is in our hands, that is one thing. But if one should take place again—”

V. Sally O’Keefe

In the Inglaterra Hotel on Corriente Street, Sally O’Keefe had the floor-length windows of their room wide open to a picture night that booked like something on a travel poster.

She was standing there framed against them, arms out in arrested ecstasy. She was short and slight, hair a reddish gold, eyes blue, and rosettes of freckles on each cheek gave her face an elfin piquancy.

“Marj, isn’t that incredible? That can’t be real. Somebody painted it outside our window for our special benefit.”

Through a luminous dust composed of phosphorescent particles of greenish blue and silver, lines of incandescence had been traced, as though someone had drawn a radium-tipped stick through it that left glowing traces. These were the streets and avenues. Around and about was the bow black undulation made by the hills against a sky that, where it joined them in the west, was still a glowing turquoise, as though reflecting a hidden row of low-burning gas flames strung out along its base. Up above in the center of its dome it had darkened to night, but the warm rich darkness of semitropic night, so lavishly scattered with stars they were like a blinding shower of permanently upflung confetti. Or the after-stages of a burst skyrocket.

“Now I can die happy!” the girl at the window rhapsodized.

Marjorie King, her traveling companion, more practical, smiled into the dresser glass before which she sat completing the final touches of her toilette. She was a brunette, with a sort of stateliness to her good looks that the other’s pertness lacked. Even seated, she was obviously a good head or two taller than the other girl. The casting director of a stage production could have differentiated them more accurately than the ordinary layman; Marjorie was the show-girl type, Sally the pony chorus girl. Neither of them, as a matter of fact, was of the theater. Sally was the private secretary to a harvesting-machinecompany vice-president. Marjorie was branch manager for one of a large chain of candy stores, known as “Handmaid,” where everything was done by machinery but the eating. Both were on their first real vacation in years, a long-planned, long-saved-for, many-times-def erred sabbatical that they had practically had to blackmail their respective employers for. It was a free-lance trip, they would have nothing to do with conducted tours and large, sardinelike cruise parties rushing about in military formation.

“That’s Naples you’re thinking of, isn’t it?” Marjorie answered the remark. “And anyway, if it’s all you say, why spoil it by speaking of dying in the same breath with it?”

“Just a phrase, just a turn of speech,” Sally said, turning away at last and coming toward her. “When you feel as I do tonight, it has no meaning at all. I never felt so alive before in my life! This place certainly brings out the dynamism in you. What’re we doing tonight?”

Marjorie stood up, ready to go. “This was your night for making the plans, haven’t you got anything worked out? That was our arrangement, remember? One night I’m the boss, the next night you are.”

Sally essayed analyzing herself, while her friend went around putting out the lights, a habit that they were not accustomed enough to hotels to have broken themselves of yet. “I feel sort of sentimental, romantic. It must be that out there brought it on. None of these jangling, brassy casinos or night clubs for me tonight. I feel sort of pastoral—yes that’s how I feel, pastoral.”

“Pasteurized?” Marjorie teased, gathering up an outer wrap.

Sally gave her a push at the rear of the waist. “I heard somebody or other mention a place out in a park on the outskirts, where you eat in the open air under the trees,” she resumed. “They say it’s beautiful, all colored lanterns. Let’s take one of these old-fashioned carriages they have around, instead of a taxi for a change, and drive out there and back in the moonlight. The taxis here smell so of gasoline, and they get you there so fast. Yes, that’s just what I feel like,” she concluded, “a slow, easygoing, old-style carriage ride in the moonlight.”

“How far out is this place?” Marjorie asked her. “Isn’t there some story going around about a man-eating something or other that got away from some zoo or animal farm and is supposed to pounce on you in lonely places? The maid that does the room was jabbering about it a mile a minute when you were out this morning. I wasn’t able to get the story very straight; I only caught about every third word, you know how fast they talk.”

“Oh, that. The man at the American Express told me not to listen to it, there’s not a word of truth in it. I’m going to get my money’s worth out of this vacation, and no hobgoblin story is going to stop me.”

She opened the door and stood waiting for her friend to pass through. “Got everything? Don’t forget to bring some catnip in case we run into the watchamacallit,” she suggested flippantly.

Marjorie laughed as they moved toward the elevator.

Downstairs in the lobby she said, “Let’s ask and find out at the desk.”

The clerk bowed graciously, lowering his head to the end of his hair part, as they stepped over.

“We understand there’s an outdoor restaurant in the big park outside the city. Is it worth taking in? My friend and I were thinking of going there.”

His answer was indirect. “Have the senoritas tried the Tabarin or Select? I am sure they would—”

“But those are just night clubs, aren’t they?” Marjorie objected. “We have night clubs up home too. What we’re looking for is something a little different, something more atmospheric.”

“I know the place you mean,” he said somewhat reticently. “The Madrid, out in the Bosque—”

“What’s the matter with it?” Sally cut in with characteristic bluntness.

“Oh, nothing, nothing,” he hastily retracted. “It is just that it is leetle—how you say?—lejano; out of the way, far out. Are the sefloritas going unaccompanied? I could perhaps arrange—”

“Oh no, we don’t want any hired escorts,” Sally grimaced. “I hate that sort of thing.”

“The young man seems doubtful, for some reason or other,” Marjorie smiled uncertainly at her.

This time he didn’t trouble to deny it.

Sally O’Keefe reacted as Sally O’Keefe always reacted. Marjorie had known she would. “Well, people do go there after dark, don’t they?” she demanded of the clerk. And at his nodding admission, she plucked her friend by the arm. “Then we are, too! Call us one of these old-fashioned carriages.” And they went sailing out to the street to await its arrival.

Outside Marjorie laughed knowingly. “He was doing his best to discourage us, did you get it? But he wouldn’t come out with the real reason; afraid we’d cut short our stay, I suppose. You always were that way; let anyone try to talk you out of doing anything, and you’re surer than ever to go ahead and do it.”

“Steam-roller Sal,” grinned the smaller girl beside her. “Here it is now.”

They got in, settled themselves on the back seat, left open to the sky with the hood thrown back.

“What’d he say it was called, again?”

Marjorie gave the order to the coachman for her. “The Madrid.” He turned and gave them a glance of brief curiosity, then flicked his whip and they started to roll down the street with velvety smoothness. Marjorie had noted the look in passing. It might have been elicited by their festive attire or their lack of male escort, but she was inclined to think not; she had an idea it was their destination that had caused it.

“Was I right?” Sally exulted. “Isn’t this nice for a change?”

The gait of the vehicle was a lot more even and lulling than a car would have been, there was no denying that, and it gave them a much better chance to take in the sights around them. These carriages, although no longer used for practical purposes during the daylight hours, were far from being broken-down museum pieces. They were rubber-tired, their bodies kept in gleaming condition, and they were anything but an uncommon sight in Ciudad Real, particularly after dark and on Sunday afternoons.

After ten or fifteen minutes of slow coursing through the vivacious, brightly lighted streets, they came out finally upon a large glorieta, or rounded open space of pavement, ringed about with multiglobed lampposts. This was the Puerta Mayor, one of the city “gates,” although it had neither wall nor gate to show for it. Facing them across it was the main entrance to the Bosque, a vast natural park in imitation of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, mute testimony of the days when Paris had set the style in cities as well as in women’s clothes.

The main driveway of the Bosque, when they entered it, was filled with taxis, roadsters, and sedans. In fact the stream of traffic was fully as heavy as on some of the city thoroughfares behind them.

“Now what’s wrong with this?” Sally queried delightedly. “Do you see anything so lonely or scary about this? I’d like to give that clerk a piece of my mind!”

“It’s lonely like Times Square on Election Night,” admitted Marjorie with a chuckle.

“What a night!” Sally exulted. She lowered the bracketed seat opposite, put both feet up on it, and stared overhead and rearward at a pomegranate of a moon which was beginning to work its way through the trees into open sky.

Presently innumerable colored lanterns, like toy balloons staked low above the ground at the end of taut, upright strings, began to peer out at them here and there. The carriage made a turn into a private siding, the trees thinned off, and a whole vast expanse of them, like a flower bed dangling upside down, burgeoned into view. Beneath was a sea of tables in the open air, centering around a pavilion, open at the sides, containing still others. And all alike, inside and out, were filled with a vivaciously chattering, typically Latin outdoor crowd. The nostalgic wail of a tango sounded disembodiedly on the night air, without seeming to have any source, and you could tell that those upright under the pavilion roof in a small compact cluster were dancing, and not just standing there between the tables, only because each two were turned to face one another.

“Now this,” said Sally, when they had finally obtained a table far out toward the perimeter, “is what I really call something. You can have your stuffy city night clubs. Look at that.” She picked up a leaf that had fallen to the cloth from above, and held it out almost reverently for Marjorie to see.

“Sally, the hard-to-please, the chronic complainer,” observed Marjorie, with reverse implication.

Sally was usually good company at all times, pleasant to be out with; that was why they had made the trip together in the first place. Tonight she was in especially fine fettle.

“Are we getting looked at!” she reveled presently, not in the least disconcerted. “Very déclassée, I suppose, coming out alone together like this.”

“You know it isn’t that,” Marjorie teased her. “It’s probably that carrot thatch of yours, and the funny little phiz that goes with it.” She undulated her wrist watch toward her. “You’re beautiful, my dear.”

Sally squinted at one of the lanterns. “I must owe you money,” she said. “Trying to recall if I do or not. It’s the only way I can account for it. All right, you’re beautiful too, so there. I’m beautiful, you’re beautiful, what good does it do us? Two lonely old maids, twenty-four and twentyfive, all by themselves in the middle of the South American night.”

“You shouldn’t have said that,” Marjorie said in a guarded voice, laughing silently down her chin. “Don’t look up, but we’re about to be accosted.”

He was complete even down to white kid gloves. He bowed low between them. “Would one of the sefloritas care to do me the honor of dancing?”

The corner of Sally’s mouth was twitching in spite of her best efforts to control it. Close as he was, she managed to make herself audible to her friend without appearing to say anything. “Dare me?” she breathed. “Ow! what was that for?” she exclaimed, unabashed, a moment later as the point of her friend’s toe found her instep.

Marjorie saw that she would have to answer for the two of them. “No thank you,” she said with what gravity she could muster.

“Pardon,” the canvasser said stiffly. He gave another bow and left them.

“You hurt the poor man’s feelings,” Marjorie rebuked, holding her napkin to the side of her own mouth to keep the contagious laughter she was getting from the other girl from being seen.

The two of them had fallen into one of those moods of giddy, causeless hilarity that at times sweep over two women alone; they were laughing at nothing, with one another, at one another, and incited by one another.

“I thought you were feeling so romantic tonight?”

“Yeah,” said Sally, shaking her head, “but I don’t like ‘em with shoeshines on the hair.”

This brought on another gale of risibility.

“Have they a union? They’ll be picketing this table, the first thing we know.”

“Say, wouldn’t that look funny?” visualized Marjorie. “Three or four of them carrying signs and doing little dance steps back and forth in front of us—” The mental image she managed to convey sent them into still another spasm.