Black Alibi (13 page)

Robles whirled on him. “What do you mean?”

The American eyed him almost contemptuously. “A jungle animal, once in here, would turn its back on all this greenery, trees and plants and protective shubbery, all the very things its instinct leads it to seek, and deliberately return of its own choice to the stone and asphalt traps of the streets out there? Ha!”

One of the other operatives rushed to the defense of his superior, probably to regain his esteem, before Robles himself could answer. “There are traces left by bloodied paws on the outside of the wall, where it dropped down
after
the attack had been completed. We have already photographed them.”

It was a telling blow; Manning’s mouth opened, closed again, without his being able to utter a word.

“And just for
golpe de gracia
, look at that,” Robles said crushingly. He borrowed a small pair of forceps, stooped down swiftly over the mangled form a second time, fortunately keeping his back to all of them as he did so. Manning couldn’t see what it was he was using the forceps to extract, only the wrench of his elbow joint that accompanied the act.

He stood up again, turned, again bedded it on paper. This time it looked like a small thorn, curved, and thicker at one end than the other.

“And in the face of this, you still think it’s not a jaguar?” he parodied tartly. “Hold that glass over it a minute, for senor the know-it-all.”

Manning peered down at it, magnified. It was enlarged now to a miniature tusk, of hornlike substance, broken off short at the wide end. “What is it, a tooth? A fang?”

“For anyone that knows so much about jaguars, you are not very good; you should study up on your zoology,” was Robles’ merciless retort. “It is the tip of one of its claws, broken off short. And left imbedded in her throat.”

Manning couldn’t answer for a minute, but he wouldn’t give in, retract. He drew his head away from the derisive proximity with which Robles was holding the nauseating token up to him, muttered disconcertedly: “It’s against all the laws of nature for it to turn its back on here and go out there again.”

Robles raised his voice overbearingly. “When the laws of nature conflict with indisputable evidence like this, the laws of nature go into the discard. Who is to say what they are anyway— you? I? Are we animals ourselves? Not enough is known about this species, in the first place, to lay down hard-and-fast rules of behavior for them. They can be as unpredictable as human beings, for all we know. Perhaps it is not the nature of jaguars to return to built-up streets. This one did. perhaps it has grown accustomed to its lair. Perhaps it is the one exception to the rule. But exception or not, it is still a jaguar!”

The heretic properly and publicly shown the error of his ways, to the obvious satisfaction of all his men, he turned back to the business at hand. “Who is it keeps making that noise?” he inquired irritably.

“
El novio
,” someone murmured.

“Have you questioned him yet? Bring him over here.”

The grief-crazed youth in the belted topcoat was hurried staggeringly forward between the two men who had been supporting him the whole time.

“Raul Belmonte,” read off Robles’ assistant. “Fourteen Calle San Vicente. Cashier, Banco de Comercio.”

His face was pitiful. A man shouldn’t love too deeply, Manning thought, looking at it; it’s better for him not to. He’s more defenseless than a woman, when it comes to a thing like this, that he can’t fight back against.

“Are you able to talk, Belmonte?” Robles said curtly. “Give us your story.”

His voice was dead, listless.

“—I came out to telephone to her home to find out from this little servant girl who was backing us up whether she’d really started out at all. To do so, I must have entered the very establishment she was in at the time with her companera, it’s the only place around there one can telephone from. She must have been sitting hidden from me in a booth at the back. My back must have been to her, in the telephone enclosure off to one side, and as she left, we neither of us saw one another! Then, on finding the grounds locked, instead of leaving at once, I returned across the road a second time, to ease my disappointment with a cognac before driving off. And when I finally emerged at last and got into my car, it seemed to me that far off somewhere I heard a faint cry—I remember that now. But I thought it was my imagination, and I was too heavyhearted at not having seen her to care what it was. What had it to do with me?”

He was starting to shiver. Robles made a sign and they led him away. “Lock him up for the time being,” the inspector said quietly as soon as he was out of hearing.

“Surely you don’t think—?” Manning expostulated.

“Protective arrest,” Robles answered. “He is a danger to himself, until he has recovered somewhat. It is written all over him.”

Manning turned and moved slowly away from the hideous glare that continued to beat down on the mortal remains of Conchita Contreras. They all glanced after him curiously, noticing the thoughtful way he held his head lowered and kicked at nothing along the ground, to show the personal dissatisfaction and lack of conviction he derived from this.

“He’s got an obsession, that man,” he heard Robles explaining scornfully to some of his cohorts without troubling to lower his voice much, “that there is some other element than the jaguar involved in this. Don’t ask me why!”

“Don’t ask me either,” Manning turned his head to call back. “But don’t ask me to give it up.” He put his foot to the lower rung of one of the ladders, to get out of the accursed place.

“It’s right here before his very eyes,” Robles went on in a loud, carrying voice, provoked by the opposition. “Look, the very ribs are exposed in places! Nothing human could commit such a shambles.”

They were dropping slowly below Manning, a rung at a time. “And I say the very opposite,” he contradicted over his shoulder, “that only something human could be so thorough about it. It’s carried too far for even the most vicious brute animal. Their rages don’t last that long, the death of the quarry ends them. Their memories are shorter—”

A hard, mirthless laugh went up all around as he straddled the top of the wall with his legs and took his unlamented and somewhat undignified departure.

IV. Clo-Clo

Clo-Clo was rapidly tiring of the German merchant-marine officer. She wasn’t sure he was German and she wasn’t even sure he was a merchant-marine officer. All she knew was he came from one of those countries where the people have butter-colored hair and blue eyes and can’t speak Spanish properly, and that he had tarnished brass buttons on his short blue jacket, instead of the bone kind other people wore.

There was nothing personal in this rapid tiring on her part. Just as there was nothing personal in anything she did after six in the evening. Those were her working hours. He hadn’t been any too loaded with money even when she first met him—some of his shipmates must have warned him, before he came ashore down on the coast, about bringing his whole pay up to the city with him at one time—and now he had slowed down to about a drink a half-hour. Also, he kept wanting to marry her all the time, and that made for heavy conversation. The main thing wrong with him, though, was he was holding her up, making her behindtime on her schedule of nightly rounds. She’d have to skip her ten-o’clock stop and go straight on to the midnight one, from here.

Clo-Clo adhered to a rigid timetable. She lived by the clock. If you didn’t, you didn’t get anywhere. You had to work fast, you had to keep going. Each night had its fixed stops, and each stop had its hour and its allotted duration. The day. light hours up to, say, about seven or eight in the evening, that was strictly antemeridian, that didn’t count. You didn’t expect anything. You didn’t get anything. You stayed home and did your hair. You washed stockings. You lazed around. If you felt good maybe you even gave the poor old lady a hand, with that never-ending cooking and dishing it out to hungry mouths that she was always doing. Or if you went out, it was just to get something you needed, a bit of nail polish at the five-and-ten. The grand sortie didn’t come until around eight, eight-thirty. You looked things over, you got their feel, you warmed yourself up. Her nine-o’clock stop was the Elite Bar. This was the Elite Bar now. There wasn’t really much doing yet. The real swells, the real spenders, were all still at home with their families, lingering over their cigars and after-dinner drinks. At nine o’clock you got things like this foreign sea officer, good enough to kill time with, a couple of brandies over a bar.

Ten to eleven was a notch up the social scale. Places like the Tivoli and the Miraflor Gardens. The swells were all at shows around now, they still hadn’t appeared yet. You hung around over a table, with young writers, clerks, businessmen. Wine now.

Midnight to about two was the zenith. Meridian of her “day.” That was when the shows let Out. They let out late in Ciudad Real. The Casino Bleu, the Madrid out in the park (she never went out there, though; too far to walk back in case you didn’t connect), the Jockey Club, the Tabarin, the Select. Those were the places to seek out then. That was the cream of the night life, swarming with the sports, the swells, the heavy spenders. Most of them had cabaret entertainment; if not, tango bands and dancing at the very least. Benedictine, then. Crčme de menthe. Sometimes even champagne.

It tapered off quickly after that. From about three on, that was the lees of the night. That was the time to watch out for. That was the time when the laughter died down, lights started thin ning and the shadows came creeping on, and if you were smart you didn’t hang around any more, you went on home. It was a bad time. “The Blue Hour,” some of them called it. “The Deathwatch,” others. It was a time when things sometimes happened. Things they told you about behind the back of the hand. If they were going to at all, that was when they did.

So it will be seen, Clo-Clo was on the town. The technical designation for her might be a little harder to arrive at. She was acquiring a second nickname, in fact, that threatened to obliterate the first. “
Enganadora
,” the little cheat. Fulfillment withheld for promises implicit in her very presence at the places she went. She honored obligations only when cornered, and even then, in a manner that made it hardly worth while, except for professional wrestlers. She had already had one or two brushes with the police; not because of her supposed activities, but because of their absence. Others in her own immediate bracket would warn her, “Look out,
chica
, you’ll be getting a bad reputation. Once you do, they’ll steer clear of you like a bad case of smallpox.” In other words, in the underworld a bad reputation was directly inverse to what was commonly meant by One in the upperworid.

Nonetheless, Clo-Clo remained stubbornly, you might even say fanatically, virtuous at heart. Her every instinct was that of the good, respectable, industrious middle-class girl who expects to be a wife someday. She had her own future all staked out. By thirty at the latest she was going to be married to some honest, hard-working fellow, and have a raft of kids, and maybe a little produce farm outside of town, just a patch. And if any of them were girls, and so much as
looked
at anybody, she’d knock the left side of their faces loose from the right.

She still had eleven years and six months to go.

This interlude, therefore, was not a question of looseness of character, it was a matter of financial stringency. Her intrinsic morality was not in the least impaired by it. Strangers in bars couldn’t reach that. It was simply being bent a little to permit her to achieve financial security.

At home, in the tumbledown shack on Rivera Street, with shoals of kids sleeping all over the place, they knew that Clo-Clo was not exactly a saint, but the money sure came in handy. They didn’t inquire too closely into her comings and goings. They had a euphemism for her prolonged and nightly absences, among themselves, among their friends and neighbors, if anyone inquired for her. “
Salio para dar una vuelta
.” She went out to take a stroll. Well, she had, in a way. One of these little strolls of hers had once taken her clear across the spine of the continent, as far as Buenos Aires. But she had come back two days later perfectly unharmed, having jumped the train just one station before it got in in order to retain her free dom of movement, and with marvelous tales to tell.

Her fat, slow-moving mother would sigh and shrug as she broomed a few of the younger kids out of the way. She was a good daughter. Here in the home, she was a good daughter. Outside; well, that was outside. After all, who was perfect in this world? Should she, a mother, throw the first stone at her own child? Besides, it was only for now, a great change was coming someday. Didn’t she, Clo-Clo, say so herself over and over? “You wait,
mamita
, when I’m thirty I’m going to stop being bad, I’m going to be good after that.”

And now here she was, stuck in a nine-o’clock stop with a nine-o’clock patron, and it was rapidly nearing eleven. And one of the sentimental type, the worst kind. The more sentimental they got, the less they seemed to spend. This one, perhaps more perspicacious than she gave him credit for being and sensing something within her beneath the scabby outer shell, wanted her to come back to the ship with him, wanted to marry her and take her to someplace called Copenhague and settle down with her there on a dairy farm that he would buy.

This was sheer nonsense as far as Clo-Clo was concerned. A peso slipped into one’s hand at leave-taking, as a little gesture of gratitude for one’s time and entertainment efforts, was worth a dozen offers of marriage in Copen, whatever it was.

She was sitting perched there on one of the tall bar stools alongside him, hair a short-cropped black chrysanthemum mop, in a pert bang above the eyes. Her attitude was a clever synchronization of absorption and vacuity; the former assumed, the latter real. She was sitting sidewise, with her face toward him, the point of her elbow to the bar and the back of her head balanced in her outspread hand. She sidled one leg unnoticeably off the rung of the stool, felt for the floor with it, and poised it toe down, having decided to break this off short without wasting any more time about it.