Nipped in the Bud Read online

  They came up to the car, and she unlocked the door. “Hop in,” she told the boy, and he hopped. From beneath the car came a sheepish, bedraggled brown shadow, who hopped too. Talleyrand sat on the front seat, wagging his stump of a tail furiously, aware that he had transgressed the mysterious laws of humankind but confident of being scolded and forgiven.

  “You!” she cried. “What have you to say for yourself?”

  Talley wagged wider, unable to explain that when the press of greyhounds had become too great he had wisely withdrawn from the fray, vaulted the infield fence, and then circled around until he found a way out through the enclosure.

  They drove back into Tijuana, and as they came past the Hotel Primero Vito put a hand on her arm. “We stop here, no? Maybe my cousin Carlos has found out where the gorls live?”

  It was Miss Withers’ considered opinion that his cousin Carlos couldn’t find his own pants pocket, but she prided herself on keeping an open mind. “Very well,” she said, and drew over to the curb. “You may go and see.”

  In a moment the boy was back, grinning. “You come with me, lady. My cousin Carlos has found where the gorls live.” He gestured. “Right there!”

  “Right where?”

  “In the hotel!”

  “I see,” said Miss Withers grimly. “Now he tells us.” She paid Vito his remaining five dollars, patted him gently but firmly on the head, and sent him on his way.

  “But, lady—”

  “Enough is enough,” said the schoolteacher, who had had a difficult day and a still more difficult night. She watched the boy out of sight and then crossed the Avenida and again entered the hotel. Nothing, it seemed, had changed except that some of the lights in the lobby were dimmed and the palm trees in their pots were even dustier.

  This time she went directly to the desk. The same young man was there, reading the same newspaper. “I am sorry, but we have no vacancies,” he said firmly.

  “Oh?” Miss Withers hastily replanned her strategy. “I had so hoped that you would have something for me. You were so well recommended.”

  “By who?”

  Resisting the impulse to correct his English, she said, “Why, by the two American girls—”

  “Norteamericanas?” It was a mild reproof, but definite.

  “Of course. Miss Jones and her companion—they do live here?”

  The ophidian eyes were ever so faintly amused. “They did, señora. But they checked out a little while ago.”

  “Oh?” Miss Withers blinked. “But that was very sudden, wasn’t it?”

  The padded shoulders shrugged delicately. “Perhaps. But death is always sudden, is it not?”

  “Death?” Suddenly there was a new scent in the schoolteacher’s flaring nostrils, drowning out the dusty odor of the potted palms, the musky reek of the man’s pomade. It was an acrid, bitter scent—the smell of defeat.

  10

  “Be bold, Be bold, and every where, Be bold …”

  —EDMUND SPENSER

  THE OILY YOUNG MAN at the desk waited patiently, obviously enjoying the impression he had made. But then Miss Withers remembered the affinity that all Spanish peoples have for la muerte, even to the extent of giving their children grinning skulls of candy and gingerbread to play with. “Let’s back up and start over,” she said crisply. “Whose death was it? Not one of the young ladies?”

  “Oh, no, señora.” There was almost a trace of regret in the soft, chocolaty voice. “But Miss Jones said they had to leave suddenly because of a death in the family.”

  The schoolteacher relaxed. Whose death it had been and how long ago it had happened were not hard to guess at. The ripples made by Tony Fagan’s splash into eternity were still moving outward, as they would move forever.

  Dallas and Ina—it could be nobody else—had obviously fled in a panic because somehow they had learned that questions were being asked about them. Vito, of course! The little scamp had taken her money and then, while she was eating dinner, had dashed off to turn another fast dollar by warning the quarry. But at least she was on the right trail. “Can you tell me where they’ve gone?” Miss Withers pressed hopefully. “I’m most anxious to reach them, because they are relatives—nieces of mine. Did they make reservations anywhere?”

  The clerk shrugged. “They only throw everything into a so-beautiful big blue Cadillac and go. I suppose maybe they go home.”

  Miss Withers had reasons for supposing maybe not, but she did not voice them. “But surely they left a forwarding address for mail and things?”

  He grudgingly informed her that the young ladies had received no mail. The New York address given when they registered would have been located, the schoolteacher realized, somewhere in the midst of the Central Park Zoo.

  “Perhaps Miss Jones and her companion will return here,” she said. “Meanwhile the room they left must be vacant, is it not? May I see it, please?”

  The objections were almost interminable. The rent of the suite had been paid for the rest of the week, and really it should stand vacant. Moreover, the rooms were no doubt in great disorder. They would have to be set to rights, and the maids would not return until tomorrow. The clerk was a thousand times sorry, but he himself could not leave his desk to do the work of the housekeeper.

  Miss Withers played her ace in the form of another five-dollar bill, and a moment later was headed up the stairs with a key in her hand. Three-A was at the end of the second-floor hall, in the front. Her heart beating high, the schoolteacher entered and turned on the light. She found herself in a surprisingly comfortable living room, furnished in ranchero style with handmade leather chairs and couch, and even a venerable radio in one corner. The place, however, had the appearance of having been tossed like a mixed green salad. Whoever had lived here had decamped as if all the devils of hell were after them, instead of one lone spinster.

  The dust of their departure was only just beginning to settle, and, old Indian tracker that she was, Miss Withers decided that half an hour sooner and she would have bumped into the girls head-on. So near and yet so far; she felt like the farm boy who almost heard the cow bell. Yet just possibly there were things still to be learned here. She closed her eyes and sniffed, noting a heavy, exotic perfume and a lighter one, probably gardenia; bath salts, cigarettes, leather, and fingernail polish.

  Pari-mutuel tickets from this very afternoon’s improvement of the breed at Caliente were scattered on the floor, mostly ten-and fifty-dollar win tickets. There was a marked program, much thumbed and twisted. Somebody had made neat checkmarks against the names of the lighter-weighted horses. Somebody had also, if one could judge by the remaining tickets, lost well over eight hundred dollars today. Other flotsam and jetsam included a spool of No. 50 white thread, a sheer nylon stocking (size 7) without a visible snag or run, an almost new Canasta deck, a dozen tickets on next Wednesday’s drawing of the Lotería Nacional at Mexico City, a bitten apple and an empty aspirin bottle.

  The bathroom was equally unrevealing, except that forgotten in the tub was an almost new cake of scented soap which the schoolteacher estimated would have cost two or three dollars back home. In the trash basket were used facial tissue, the shell of a carmine lipstick, half-a-dozen empty beer cans and a quart bottle that had once held prefabricated Manhattan cocktails.

  There was still the small bedroom with its twin beds, both neatly made up but bearing on their spreads the mark of suitcases flung open for packing. The closets were bare except for dangling wire hangers, the bureau drawers all half-open and askew. In one of them Miss Withers noticed several bronze hairpins, a pair of tiny green dice, some spilled face powder, and a sales slip from Anton’s on the Avenida for a fifty-dollar alligator handbag. She began to have a growing feeling of frustration. No letters, no lost little address book, no diary or telephone numbers hastily scribbled on a wall somewhere.

  Back in the living room the schoolteacher riffled through the piles of American magazines on the table, Vogue and Flair and The New Yorker
, Harper’s and Holiday and True Romances; all the current movie fan magazines, enough of them indeed to stock the periodical room of a fair-sized public library. As a last resort she probed beneath the cushions of the couch and chairs, coming up with eighty cents in change, a twenty-five-centavo piece, a smashed liqueur chocolate and a single copper-jacketed cartridge which she fancied must fit a small-caliber gun, such as a .28. This, as everything, she left as it was.

  The birds had flown, and there seemed nothing in the abandoned nest to suggest the probable direction of flight. Yet perhaps the simple fact that they had decamped at the first hint of an inquiry being made about them was significant. Why leave a comfortable haven like this? They were safe here on Mexican soil; they could laugh and snub their pretty noses at amateur detectives and, for that matter, at police and process servers, too.

  Unless Dallas Trempleau was afraid that little Ina would weaken under pressure. She must be determined, of course, to keep the younger girl down here until after Junior Gault’s trial, which couldn’t be postponed forever. There might be some point, Miss Withers decided, in getting Ina alone sometime and pointing out to her a few of the facts of life about murder—and murderers.

  The schoolteacher realized that from the point of view of the room clerk she must be taking a rather long time to decide about whether or not she wanted the place. She snapped out of her musings and went hastily back to turn off the bedroom light. Standing in the middle of the room to have one last look around, suddenly she heard a brisk tattoo at the front door and the sound of its being thrown open. “Comes trouble,” murmured Miss Withers under her breath. Her five dollars’ worth was evidently up. “Yes?” she called out.

  “Come out, my beautifuls, wherever you are!” It was a man’s voice, young and strong and musical. “Look, my ball-and-chain-to-be had to start back to Hollywood because she has a story conference early tomorrow morning, and see what she has left behind!” He was a tall, beautiful, lightly-bronzed young man, wearing a frantic Hawaiian shirt, English flannel slacks, and red sandals. In each hand he carried a large green bottle. The smile on his classic features froze there as Miss Withers suddenly appeared in the doorway. “Who’re you?” he demanded suspiciously. “And where are the girls?”

  “I am all the girls there are,” Miss Withers said crisply. Then she noticed that there was another man behind the first intruder, an older, less beautiful character in a sober blue-serge suit. He was obviously Mexican, with Indian cheekbones and an old-world beak of a nose.

  “Sorry,” said the young man in the fancy shirt. “Wrong room. We were looking for Dallas and Ina….”

  “It happens to be the right room,” said Miss Withers. “But no girls. My—my nieces seem to have suddenly moved out. But don’t be in a hurry, young man. If you’re a friend of theirs, perhaps you can suggest where to find them?”

  The colorful youth, it developed, was not only a bosom friend but a next-door neighbor. He introduced himself, with professionally charming manners, as one Nikki Braggioli. His companion was Ramón something-or-other….

  “Ramón Julio Guzman y Villalobos, Lic., Investigationes Privados,” was the legend on his card, with an address on the Calle Augustin Melgar. He was charmed to make the acquaintance of the Señora—sorry, Señorita Withers—and after a quick but searching glance around the room he sat down on the edge of a leather chair, obviously alert and ready to rise again at any moment.

  But Miss Withers had set about cultivating them both shamelessly. It was not too difficult to pump Nikki—he was friendly as a puppy. Or perhaps a kitten would have been more apt as a comparison, for he was filled with an innocent selfishness. In ten minutes the schoolteacher learned that he was the son of an Italian father and an English mother, educated at a public school in Surrey but caught by the war in his native land. He had managed to avoid active participation in Mussolini’s youth movements, but after the war and the invasion of Italy by American motion-picture companies he had been chosen to play a bit part in Paradox’s mammoth “Hannibal at the Gates,” the eight-million-dollar epic they had recently shot on location in Rome. There he had met and wooed or been wooed by the coauthor of the screenplay, Mary May Dee, who had had to return to Hollywood when the picture was in the can, but who had arranged for his flying across the Atlantic and who now drove down every week end to be with him. He himself would have to remain here until his number came up on the quota, after which would ring out the wedding bells. Too bad he had missed a chance to try out for the part of Valentino in the screen biography, but there would be other parts, and with his future wife’s influence. “You have heard of her, of course?”

  “Of course,” admitted Miss Withers, trying hard. She never noticed the names of writers on the screen. There had been her own brief whirl in Hollywood, as technical adviser on the life of Lizzie Borden, but that had been many years ago. Since then Paradox Studios had probably changed ownership, management, all of its writers and everything except its ingénues and the plots of its pictures.

  With an effort the schoolteacher managed to get the conversation back on the track, but Nikki’s mind seemed to be a perfect blank on the question of where the missing girls might be. They had, he implied, been simply delightful neighbors and companions for going places. On the Trempleau pocketbook, Miss Withers presumed; this orchid man was purely a decorative, parasitic growth. “We had much fun,” Nikki admitted wistfully. “They love to gamble.”

  That much Miss Withers would readily concede. One of them at least was gambling for high and dangerous stakes.

  “What else would Norteamericanas come down here for?” put in the older man suddenly. His jet eyes sparkled, his sardonic mouth tightened into a wry smile. “They come here only to gamble, to marry or divorce or get drunk.”

  A brief silence, tactfully covered by Nikki’s saying, “Perhaps then the young ladies go home? Why not? To me—to most Europeans today at least, it seems strange why people who can live in the United States ever go anywhere else.”

  “There are other good places to live besides in the Colossus of the North,” pronounced Señor Guzman sententiously. “And speaking of going home—” He rose.

  “An excellent idea,” agreed Miss Withers. She ushered her callers gently but firmly out of the place and locked the door carefully. After pausing at the desk in the lobby to return the key and to explain that she would like to think it over and make up her mind about the suite, she hurried out to the rented coupe and Talley. On the sidewalk was Señor Guzman, looking vainly for a taxicab.

  “May I give you a lift?” she wanted to know. “I’m going right through town….”

  He bowed stiffly, and consented to embark. Talleyrand had awakened and greeted the stranger as he greeted all strangers, with great enthusiasm. He was rebuffed. “In my country,” said Guzman by way of apology, “we do not sentimentalize over dogs.”

  “Nor over any animals, especially bulls,” said Miss Withers, but to herself. “Tell me,” she said casually. “How long has Mary May Dee been paying you to keep an eye on her handsome young fiancé?”

  He said, “But I do not understand.”

  “Aren’t you, according to your business card, a private detective?”

  Guzman produced another card, with slightly different lettering. “I am also a licensed abogado, a member of the bar.”

  “I knew it! There is something distinguished about you lawyers—”

  It was laid on with a trowel, but he softened perceptibly. “Mary May Dee is a client of mine,” he said. “I have secured several divorces for her, but she has not hired me to watch over her intended. As a matter of fact—”

  Miss Withers had long held a private opinion that “as a matter of fact,” like “really and truly,” usually meant the exact opposite, but she did not say so. He went on, “I was only introduced to Nikki Braggioli yesterday, when we met in a bar. Miss Dee introduced us, and he seized the opportunity, when she was out of the room, to tell me that he had American friends, beautiful
neighbors, who were in some sort of difficulties and who had asked him if he knew someone experienced and discreet who knew about criminology and detective work. I explained that I had some slight experience in the field, and he promised to take the first opportunity to introduce me, which happened to be this evening—or so we thought.”

  Surprised, the schoolteacher cut the throttle a little. If the girls had been looking for a private detective, then they must have been afraid of something. That might even explain the cartridge in the chair cushion. “I don’t suppose, Señor Guzman, that you were advised of what it was that my—my nieces were worried about?”

  Inside the dark and moving car she could not clearly see his face, and his voice was without expression. “I was not, señorita. I have no idea what they wanted. Now they have gone, and I have wasted an evening.”

  They were now coming back into the business section of the town. “You are so busy, then?”

  “Señorita,” he told her soberly, “on a good night sometimes I marry and divorce half a dozen couples, at a very comfortable fee.”

  She jammed the brakes. “Don’t tell me you are a judge too?”

  “No, no judge. You do not understand. If anybody really wants to get married here, they must wait three days and go through the usual formalities. If they want a divorce they have to have witnesses and appear in court. But for Americans we have a special deal. They merely sign a marriage or divorce paper, which later I mail to Chihuahua, where maybe later the paid proxies appear in court and complete the proceedings—if my esteemed fellow-counselors do not forget about the whole thing or mislay the papers. In any case the Yanquis think they are legally married or divorced as the case may be, which is the important thing, no?”