Black Alibi (15 page)

Clo-Clo jumped up from the table alarmedly, ran around behind him. “You should rest for five minutes.” Thump. “You’ll kill yourself.” Thump. “Isn’t there something
sad
we can talk about, just until you get over this?”

He continued to shake. “We tried that,” he said weakly. “That was what we were supposed to be doing this time. But even when you try to tell something sad, it comes out funny. Harder than that, there must be a piece of chicken lodged there.”

“Wait a minute, I’ll pour a little cold champagne down the back of your neck. The shock may dislodge it. Like with hiccups. Do you mind?”

He waved a hand in helpless permission. “Go ahead. I don’t care what you do to me. If I die here in this chair, it’s been worth it—”

“I’ll get up high,” the helpful Clo-Clo said. “So it’ll give a little splash.” She pulled her own chair around to the rear of his, stood up on it, and tilted a champagne bottle with both hands. “Now get ready, here it comes—”

The door was flung open without the preliminary of any knock, and what can best be described as a gasp of virtuous outrage entered and swirled about the room like a current of chill air. Its producer remained posed accusingly at the threshold without coming forward. It was the same priggish young man with the needlepointed mustaches whom Clo-Clo had glimpsed earlier in the bar alcove.

They were both staring at him by indirection, in a wall mirror opposite that gave them back his reflection, coming from behind them.

Clo-Clo’s supper companion murmured ruefully for her private benefit, “That was the shock I needed. It went down by itself.”

She regained the floor with a lithe bound, returned the bottle of christening champagne to its bucket.

No one had said anything yet, at least not for general inclusion.

The dinner-jacketed sphinx in the open doorway finally broke the ice. He said a single word: “
Papa!
”

The older man in the chair waved his hand disgustedly, without turning to look at him. “Please close the door. I’ll be right out.”

“I’ll wait for you in the foyer. You came here with
us
, please remember that!”

Clo-Clo’s host mumbled something indistinct that sounded like, “Try and forget it!” The door closed.

Clo-Clo gasped, “Not your
son!
Why you hardly look—”

He sighed, shrugged, clapped his sides frustratedly as he rose to his feet. “It is having sons like him that makes one old,” he complained half under his breath.

Then his expression changed, he smiled at her, wistfully, almost tenderly. He took her hand between both of his, carried it to his lips. “Never mind, we had some fun, didn’t we? I’ll have to go now. I don’t know whether we’ll ever meet again. We live outside of town, and I’ll never hear the end of this. But, little Clo-Clo, you’re a lovely girl. You’ve made me feel young again for an hour or two. Like I used to be years ago. You’ve made me feel happy with your laughter and your little ways. Let me do something for you. You deserve it. That sour-pussed daughter-in-law of mine gets enough of it as it is.”

“Not so much, senor!” For probably the first time in her life the protest was genuine, almost alarmed.

He’d given her a hundred and fifty pesos, out of a wallet that must have held close to a thousand.

“Take it, take it,” he said. He folded her fingers persuasively back upon it, patted her hand reassuringly. “Anyone that calls you bad, they must be blind,” he said with low-voiced sincerity. “To make others happy, what better claim to goodness is there than that?”

She looked down, abashed for a moment. She was used to all sorts of compliments, but not to having her sanctity praised.

He gave a little smile of mischievous approval.

“That’s right, put it down where they won’t get at it, don’t let them take it from you, hang Onto it.” And then, almost as though some premonition were assailing him, he urged: “Be careful, little Clo-Clo. I know I’ve got champagne in me, but— Don’t let anything happen to you. Your way of life is so dangerous at times. I am a man that would not hurt you. But there are others— Go home, now that I’ve given you this. Don’t stay out any more tonight.”

“I won’t,” she promised fervently, hands pressed tight to her bosom where the money now rested. “Believe me, I won’t!”

Something about her must be still getting at him. He even made a move toward removing a large diamond ring on his little finger. Then he changed his mind regretfully. “Those two vultures would miss it the first thing, and only make trouble for you.”

The door was flung open again at this point. The younger man was even sorer than before. “Papa! The car is waiting. I’ve told Elena you’ve been suffering from an upset stomach. How much longer do you think I can keep her from finding out about this—this situation I’ve found you in?”

“I’m coming!” Clo-Clo’s late host thundered infuriatedly. “I’m coming, you damn kill-joy!”

He turned and went out after him. Even so, his last thought was of Clo-Clo. As he closed the door lingeringly after him, he repeated what he’d said before, in a poignant murmur of farewell. “Don’t let anything happen to you, little Clo-Clo. Take care of yourself.”

She got up and waltzed around the room, holding skirt aloft at waist level and revealing a sector of abbreviated pink hip trunk. A chair went over at her spinning passage and she let it lie. She snatched up one of their partially filled glasses and drained it on the wing, put it back again the next time she came around. Then the second one. Then she stopped whirling and attended to the bottle remaining in the ice bucket. This was not dipsomania on her part, it was thrift pure and simple. It was a shame to waste good champagne that had already been paid for.

She was standing there with her back to the ceiling-high terrace windows, alternating gulps of champagne and bites of chicken sandwich, when something upaccountably made her turn her head. The drapes had been drawn closed over the window, for privacy, by the waiter when they first came in. There was a gap, however, midway down the long intersection where they had fallen partly open again. A feeling of being looked at through it came over her. It was so strong she even went over toward it and tried to peer through. There wasn’t anything or anyone out there. Just the canalized light gleam cast on the terrace flooring by the room lights in here escaping through.

She came out of the room a few minutes later, munching the last of the chicken. The barman, wiping a glass, said jeeringly out of the corner of his mouth as she passed, “Left flat, eh?”

She thumbed her nose at him in a long, lingering farewell insult, that lasted from the third bar stool all the way out to the porte-cochere, turning her head slowly in time with it as she did so.

And now to go home. She was whistling softly under her breath as the pinkish-amber glow of the Tabarin’s lights faded out behind her. There were stars overhead, and the night felt cool and good. And the hundred fifty pesos at her bosom felt even better. She snapped her thumbnail at the fluted iron post of a street lamp as she passed it, just for luck. It hummed hollowly for several moments after, like a muted organ note.

She was passing through tortuous, cobbled San Rafael Street a few minutes later, when a church bell somewhere near by tolled the hour. She counted the strokes as they lowered out above her in the night stillness, each one seeming to hang vibrantly suspended until the next had come along to displace it.

Three already. She shivered defensively, quickened her step a little. The Deathwatch was begining. The Blue Hours. Time to get in, pull walls around you. She quitted the sliver of sidewalk, took the indented middle of the narrow thoroughfare, undeterred by the thread of open sewage coiled along it. A moment later she was glad she’d done so. A columnar blackness standing unsuspected in the niche of a setback doorway found voice as she went by, slurred softly: “Hey, what’s your hurry?”

“Shop closed!” she snapped, and quickened to a run, and kept it up until she’d reached the lower end of San Rafael, and it had opened up into one of the subsidiary plazas that dotted the town. This one had palms, a bandstand kiosk, a gleaming white statue of one of the heroes of independence, and faint arc lights gleaming in misty violet around the four sides of it. It was dead to the world.

She cut across it, and on the other side had a choice of two. San Jacinto was the shortest way out to her own place, but it was another of those long, dismal, poorly lighted lanes like the one she’d just left. i5th of May would take her a little out of her way, but it boasted a little better lighting and there was an occasional food or drink shop to be found along it. Other nights when she came along here she never hesitated, she took the quickest way. Tonight, for some reason, she was in a creepy mood, shy of dark and lonely places. She entered the Calle Quince de Mayo. The two diverged like the arms of a narrow V.

She had just gone past a small, dimly-lighted
bodega
, a drinking and eating place patronized by the poor, a few moments later, when someone came out and hailed her.

“Hola! Is that you, Clo-Clo?”

It was one of the others of her own immediate sorority, a girl known as La Bruja (the witch). She had a shawl coifed around her head to ward off the night chill, and might have looked almost nun-like save for the cigarette suspended between her lips without benefit of fingers. She stood there arms akimbo.

Clo-Clo turned and went back to her, glad to find herself in someone else’s company, even though it meant a tethporary delay in her return home. After all, you didn’t have to be afraid of another girl.

“What’s the matter, you getting airy?” La Bru,ja demanded.

“Get out,” Clo-Clo chuckled disarmingly.

“Going home already? How are things?”

Clo-Clo hooked two fingers, kissed their tips to denote the indescribable. “What a night! I ran into Croesus himself.”

“Who’s he, one of these rich
paisanos
in town for a spree?”

“No, it’s somebody my mother’s always talking about.” She described the supper in glowing terms, prudently omitting all reference to the hundred-and-fifty-peso bonus. It probably wouldn’t have been believed anyway. “You know, I’m almost frightened. When things are so good, they say it’s a sign you’re in for trouble, to watch out. I hope this night don’t end up bad.”

They stood for a while like that chatting, two lone figures on the night-bound sidewalk. “Knocking off?” La Bruja asked finally.

“Sure am. I don’t want to crowd my luck any.”

“I guess I will too. Got a cigarette left on you?”

“I’ll do better than that for you. Come on, I’ll blow you to a cup of steaming coffee. I keep feeling chilly down the middle of my back.”

They went back inside the place La Bruja had just left. There was no one in it but the proprietor, a weary-looking man in rolled shirt sleeves and a floor-length apron. They sat down at one of the battered wooden tables.

The first thing Clo-Clo did was kick off her shoes under it, wiggle her toes. “Some relief, huh?”

La Bruja brooded dully down on the table top, flicked a leftover matchstick away, flapped her band in disgusted agreement toward her.

“This is the part I like best, when ‘it’s all over. Don’t have to smile, don’t have to listen, don’t have to watch what you say next.”

“Are you that way? I’m that way, too,” Clo-Clo admitted. She siphoned hot, watery coffee noisily into her mouth without lifting the cup from the table at all.

Presently, the warm brew flooding through her, she began to wax philosophical. “I wonder where we’ll all be a year from now.”

“Tomorrow night, for that matter,” said the disgruntled La Bruja, continuing to lower down upon the table.

“Tell my fortune,” Clo-Clo urged. “Come on,
chica
.”

La Bruja grinned lopsidedly at her. “I know you, you little monkey, that’s the reason you offered me the cup of coffee.”

Clo-Clo didn’t try to deny it. “After all, it’s the only relaxation I ever get during the course of an evening.”

La Bruja balanced her cigarette on the edge of the table. “All right,” she acceded wearily, “pass me your mitt.”

“No, try it with the cards. I like it better with the cards, there’s more stuff to it.” Clo-Clo raised her voice to the shopkeeper in the shadowy background. “Hey, got a deck of cards?”

“Yes, but I’m going to close up.” He turned off a light, and doubled the previous dimness.

Clo-Clo looked around at him with a mixture of sudden annoyance and nervousness, totally unlike her usual self. “Couldn’t you wait a minute, what’s your hurry?” she said sharply.

“I want to get some sleep myself,” he grumbled. “Think all I’ve got to do is stay up all night for two hustlers?”

Clo-Clo gave the table a smack. “You bring us those cards!” She wanted respect for her ten centavos. She was, for once, in the unusual position of being the customer in her own right, and she was going to get everything out of it that was coming to her.

He shuffled grudgingly forward and slapped an insanitary deck down between them. “Five more minutes, you two,” he grunted. On his way back he turned out another light. There was only one left now in the entire place, casting a smoky pooi of light down over their immediate table and nothing else. The rest was all shadows.

“Will you be able to see?” Clo-Clo asked anxiously.

“Good enough.” La Bruja, cigarette vibrating unsupported between her lips once more, shuffled deftly with a low whirring noise. “Cut,” she ordered. She began to pay them out.

Clo-Clo pointed both elbows to the table top, rested her face between her hands, looked on absorbedly. A period of low-voiced intermittent recital ensued, all on La Bruja’s part. Then it broke off again suddenly. There was a long pause.

Clo-Clo raised her eyes from the cards to the other girl’s face. “What’s the matter? Something go wrong?” Le Bruja had mangled them all together, was restacking them to start over.

“What’re you doing that for?”

“I want to try it over,” La Bruja said noncommittally.

The low-voiced recital began again. Then it stopped short again, just as before.

Once more she began over. Once more she stopped, as though at a loss.