Black Alibi (23 page)

“But isn’t it farfetched? Would even a deranged mind swallow such a probability?”

“It won’t be easy to swing it. Let’s see if we can hammer something out between us. To begin with, you must realize that they believe an American capable of anything down here, to them We’re all half wacky in the first place. That’ll help some.” He tapped on the ends of his spread fingers one by one. “You have a passion for taking walks in the moonlight, you don’t intend to let anything interfere with your habits— No, that’s no good.”

They both shook their heads in unison. “That wouldn’t tell him just where to find you, even if he did fall for it,” he added.

He glanced aside at the discarded sweater of Sally O’Keefe, suddenly brightened. “Wait a minute, I’ve got it—that gave me an idea. Something belonging to one or the other of you. Something of sentimental value, that you cannot bear to part with. You dropped it there that night, by the lake. A locket, say, that was given to you by your mother when you were a child. Or a goodluck charm. Something that you are determined not to leave the city until you have recovered.”

“It’s better than the first one, but there are still things against it. Wouldn’t I be expected to go back well escorted, even if I did go back to look for it? And why would it have to be at night? Why wouldn’t I go during the daylight hours?”

“But he’ll be watching for you, and he’ll see with his own eyes that you have come back alone, and that you
have
come back at night. What more proof can he want than that? The thing is, his attention will be drawn to that vicinity a second time, and that’s the main thing we want. Once he’s lurking around, the rest will follow automatically. He’ll see that you’re alone, and he’ll—” He didn’t finish it.

“It just may work,” she assented.

“It’s flimsy, but it just may work; that’s the best we can hope for about the whole thing anyway, there’s no guarantee it will. Through my pressagenting I have an in at most of the editorial staffs in town, I can get the item in the papers without much trouble. And without letting them catch on, naturally. Just a personal interview with you here at the hotel, submitted to put a little change in my pockets. If it should come to Robles’ attention, I can shunt him off by saying there’s not a word of truth in it, I just made it up, you’re actually scared stiff and taking the next train out of town.

“It must be very delicately done. It mustn’t be overemphasized, that would give it away. Just a couple of words thrown in offhand. Just enough to give
his
warped brain the idea, without letting him realize where he got it from himself, if possible. After all, this will be a short cut for him. He’ll know ahead of time where to look for another prospective victim, alone and helpless. Before he had to roam around endlessly, waiting for the right combination of circumstances. That wasn’t easy to get. I think he’ll fall for it. I think his murderous ego must be sufficiently swollen by now for him to disregard minor drawbacks that would have been enough to deter him in the beginning. He must think he can get .away with anything by this time. And then there’ll be the added little spur that you may have seen him, that he’d better see to it he gets rid of you without further ado, to ensure the continuance of his own immunity.”

“What about this police official and his men, aren’t they likely to be buzzing around in that park as thick as flies for the next week or so, after what happened the other night? They might frighten him away. Hadn’t we better make it some other place?”

He dug his fingers absently through his hair. “I don’t know of any other that would serve as well. To shift the locale would do away with your supposed motive for returning, that is, to reclaim something you lost in there the first time. And then its size is an added inducement to him. The others are all pretty small, wouldn’t afford enough cover.”

“Very well, then, let’s make it the Bosque. You probably know best.”

“I think we have a better chance there than almost anywhere else, no matter how farfetched it may strike you at first. For one thing, he probably watched the two of you through the trees at the Madrid, singled you out, even before you got back into the carriage that night. If he has an opportunity to do that again, watch you at his leisure over a period of an hour or two beforehand, make sure that you are entirely alone, I think the temptation will be that much stronger. We will have a chance to get in a sort of buildup of his self-confidence, so to speak. That would be lacking if you were just to roam aimlessly around some small park inside the city. th fact, I think it would look suspicious, more than anything else. For another thing, I think the recklessness, the effrontery, the supreme cheek, of returning to the same place a second time will appeal irresistibly to his egomania, give him an added thrill that he won’t be able to pass by.” He put out his cigarette. “As far as Robles and his bunch of dimwits are concerned, I think there’s an easy-enough way of getting rid of them. I’ll phone in a false report to one of the
genedarmerias
of having seen the jaguar, big as life, in an entirely different section of the city. For a few pesos extra I can even get a handful of sidewalk bums here and there to confirm it simultaneously, on other public telephones. That will draw them all away from the Bosque, clear it beautifully for us.”

“Yes, but will
he
know that? He may suspect them of still lurking—”

“He can find out for himself whether or not the Bosque is empty, without any added risk, can’t he? Remember, they’re looking for a beast in all this, not a biped. God knows how many times he has already brushed shoulders with them undetected, maybe even returned to gaze on his own handiwork from the outskirts of those morbid crowds that have gathered at each place. He can go into the Bosque in perfect safety, see for himself whether there are any stray details of police left around, for they are working openly on this jaguar job, not under cover as they would with human quarry, and when he is convinced that there aren’t, concentrate on you unhindered.”

A cord at the side of her neck stood out briefly, but she gave no other sign. “That’s the way we’ll do it,” he summed up. She was silent for a moment. Finally she asked, with a flicker of a smile that swept by too soon to be able to take a very firm hold on her features, “What night will we pick for this—date with destruction?”

“Night after tomorrow. That’ll give us fortyeight full hours to get everything ready. It’s too late for me to make the morning papers with my doctored item any more, but I can make tomorrow evening’s in plenty of time. I’ll arm you, of course, and I’ll be close enough by to see that no harm happens to you. But I’ve got to get another man in on it with me. You’ve got to be fully protected, I don’t want to take any chances on that score, and it may turn out to be something more than I can handle successfully alQne.”

“Whom will you get?”

He pondered the matter a moment. “I can’t go to Robles or any of his outfit, they all think alike about it. It’s got to be someone I can count on heart and soul. Wait, I think I know—that young fellow, what was his name again, the Contreras girl’s sweetheart, the one she used to meet in the cemetery. He ought to be all for it, if anyone is! That must have turned him inside out.”

He stood up, and she accompanied him to the door. He turned there and looked into her face searchingly. “Now look, before we go any further. There’s still time for you to back out if you want to. I don’t want to frighten you, but it’s going to be a grueling experience, as bad or worse than the first time. Worse, in fact, because now you’ll know what to look forward to ahead of time. You’ll be under a terrific strain, and have to rely completely on your own judgment, for three or four hours at a stretch. We’ll be watching every moment, from as near by as we dare, but we can’t exactly dog your footsteps or reveal ourselves to you once you’re in there, if we hope to succeed; you realize that of course. So here’s your last chance to say no, if you want to.”

She looked up into his face unwaveringly. Her mouth was just a little taut, that was all. “I’m in it with you, I thought I made that plain from the beginning.”

“Swell!” he answered warmly. “Shall we shake on it?” They gripped hands briefly. “I’ll make all the arrangements. You get all the sleep you can for the next two nights,” he advised her, opening the door.“The night after tomorrow is going to be a tough one on all of us. And try to keep from thinking of it ahead of time, if you can, Miss King.”

“Call me Marjorie,” she suggested as she started to close the door after him. “You mayn’t have the chance for very long.”

He got the address from the records of the inquest held over Conchita Contreras. It was a pleasant little one-story house, whitewashed a pastel blue, on the hilly Calle San Vicente. A serving-woman let him into a patio that was a permanent explosion of vivid magenta from the bougainvillaea trailing down its center from the tiled roof overhead. A couple of white butterflies were chasing one another endlessly around in the postage-stamp-sized square of opert sunlight, and a dark-eyed little girl peeped shyly Out at him from one of the room doorways, then drew back again. It looked like the perfect setting for a very happy home. Manning knew it wasn’t, even before he had been shown into the room where the young fellow his own age lay sprawled indolently on one elbow on a cot.

The young fellow’s hair was matted, he needed a shave, his shirt was soiled and open at the collar, and he had the red-rimmed eyes that came out of the cantinas at five in the morning. An unlighted cigarette, looped over in the middle like a piece of macaroni, was dangling between his lips.

He saw Manning’s eyes go to the photograph that had fallen to the floor beside the cot. He squinted at him with jerky querulousness. “You see a photograph down there, don’t you?” he said truculently. “A lovely face, a tender smile, soft beautiful hair. You’re lucky,
amigo
. I don’t! I’d like to swap eyes with you. How much’ll you take? I see a horrid, nameless thing, a smear of blood, clawed rags in a huddle on the ground—”

Manning looked down at the hubs of his own shoes. “I know. I was there too.”

“At night, sometimes, I hear a faint cry coming to me in the dark from where that photograph stands. ‘Raul, Raul, get me out, I’m locked in!’ Just as she must have cried unheard that night. I drink
aguardiente
to kill it. I still hear it anyway. It drives me out to roam the midnight streets—”

Manning put a hand lightly to his shoulder, turned and looked the other way. “Steady,
muchacho
, steady. That’s what I came to you about.”

Raul reached down, pulled a half-empty bottle of the stinging native brandy out from under the cot. He kicked the cork out with the thumb of the same hand that gripped the bottle’s neck He gave his mouth a preliminary wipe. “I don’t know who you are or what you want, but have a drink. That’s the best that a man can do when his girl is gone for good. More tears for my poor mother, inside there in the other room.”

Manning took the bottle, set it back on the floor again. “No, there is something better still that he can do.” He sat down on a rickety straw-bottom chair, dislodging a battered hat that had been dangling from one of its uprights. “Look, I know what the trouble is. You are pent up, you are slowly strangling with your own grief, because it was an act of fate. You cannot fight back at it. I am here to tell you you can fight’ back at it; it was not an act of fate, it was an act of man.” He watched the other’s face. “That hurts, doesn’t it? Like the antiseptic that cleans a festering wound.”

It must have. The other man—he was only a boy, really—writhed there on the cot, from one side to the other, protective hands digging into his own face.

“Who are you to know?” he said through them finally.

“Just a guy like you. A guy who uses his eyes. It went
back
over the wall into the stone-built city again, instead of staying in the foliage, the open green place of the cemetery. Does a wild thing do that? Would its nature lead it to?”

The other’s hands went down. He looked at Manning. His eyes were dangerous things. Not toward the American, toward the mental image the latter had managed to conjure up before him.

Manning went on speaking, in a low, unhurried voice; telling him about the other cases, telling him all there was to be told. “I may be wrong,” he concluded. “I’m no mystic, I haven’t second sight. But I don’t think I am. There is no way of finding out except by putting it to the test.”

“How? How are you thinking of going about it?”

Manning told him that, too.

“We need a girl.”

The pronoun didn’t escape Manning. “I’ve already got the girl,” he said. “A very brave girl. A girl who has more courage than you or I have any right to expect any girl to have.”

Raul gripped his upper arm in a vise of iron that belied his slender frame. “When do we start?” he said tersely.

“Right tonight,” the American said. “And we keep it up—every night if necessary—until we find out one way or the other.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” He sprang up on the cot with a suddenness that nearly buckled it. “
Mama!
” he bawled inside to ,the other room. And the childish epithet sounded oddly inappropriate coming in his husky, deep-toned voice. “Black coffee, for the love of God, to get this
porqueria
out of my system! A clean shirt, and a razor, and a basin of hot water. You can stop worrying. Your son is alive again!”

Last paragraphs of an item, in identical language, in El Imparciál,
La Prensa
,
Ultimas Noticias
, and all the other evening papers:

… One left Miss King with a strange feeling that perhaps she really meant it, it was not just bravado; that she would return some night again soon to the lake in the Bosque, seeking this trinket that she seems to place such store upon. Perhaps tonight, perhaps tomorrow night, who knows? One can only admire such reckless disregard for ordinary common sense, even if one does not approve of it. The Americans are a strange race.

“We have a saying in our language,” she said, as she accompanied the interviewer to the door: “Lightning never strikes in the same place twice.” And then, with a smile that the newspaper representative found most baffling, she added: “I am not afraid of any jaguar. I have good eyes. Very good eyes, even in the dark. It has always been said of me that I never forget a face.” One left with a puzzled feeling that she had not told all she knew—even to the police.