Black Alibi (2 page)

She would not, however, have been an actress if she had not enjoyed the inordinate amount of attention she was attracting. People could not take their eyes off her—or rather her appendage, which amounted to the same thing. She took out a gold-tipped cigarette, pointed it up into empty space with her lips in quest of fire. The match came accommodatingly down over her shoulder from somewhere behind her.

The press representatives arranged for by Manning now materialized from nowhere, converged upon her. “A few words, Senorita Walker?”

“
Si, como no
,” she said affably.

One of them dipped one knee, sighted a reflector toward her. “Fotógrafo, Senorita Walker?”

“Yes, you may.”

The flash had a disconcerting effect on the recumbent brute. It cowered, edged cravenly closer under the table.

“What do you call it, Senorita Walker?”

“Big Boy. That means
chamaco
in English.” This was ad libbing, but she was a performer after all.

“Have you had it long, Senorita Walker?”

“No, I only got it today. It was sent to me by a friend.”

A leer creased the corners of the interviewer’s eyes. “May we say a special friend, Senorita Walker?”

Kiki dropped her eyes, coyly rotated the toothpick thrust through the olive in her glass. “Yes, you may,” she conceded at last.

“What do you feed it, Senorita Walker?”

She was at a loss only for a moment. “Oh, a little bit of this and a little bit of that,” her stage presence came to her aid.

It was at this point that it happened. No two versions were alike afterwards as to what the immediate cause was. Some said a Pekingese passing in a car along the street just then had gone into a tantrum of barking, arousing it. Others said somebody at one of the other tables had tossed it a small piece of meat while Kiki was occupied with the interviewers, in a spirit of idle mischief, to see what it would do. Still others were inclined to believe that the intermittent flashes from the photographic apparatus had finally irritated its nervous system beyond endurance.

At any rate, there was no warning. Its furled legs suddenly shot up under it like steel springs, a disembodied snarl winged its way along the underside of the awning without seeming to have any source, the lightweight table went over, and Kiki and chair with it, and the circle of interviewers scattered like chaff.

Panic blazed up among the overcrowded tables like fire spreading through straw. There was a mass stampede to the rear, indoors, where doors could be closed protectively against it, even though they were largely glass. Women screamed, and this time not for effect, men shouted hoarsely, waiters’ trays went crashing down flat with tinny reverberations; tables and chairs toppled on all sides, glasses broke, those in tbe rear stumbled and fell to their hands and knees now and then in their efforts to get through ahead of those before them; finally, even one of the veranda door panes itself shivered and disintegrated in the melee. No one was quite sure where it was any more, nor what it was doing, and no one stopped to find out.

Kiki, screaming berserkly, couldn’t extricate herself for a minute from the position she had fallen into. She was flat on her back, but the chair seat, upended against her, held her legs helplessly in air. She had a horrifying glimpse of an infuriated black head looming upon her, ears flat, jaws balefully open in spite of the inadequate muzzle that still clung to them, to reveal a set of needlepointed fangs.

There was no time to do anything. A thick, blue-glass, mesh-protected siphon of seltzer had rolled unbroken toward her from somebody’s table. She snatched it up, hugged it to her chest, closed her eyes expiringly, and played it madly around her in all directions. Whether that saved her or the fear-maddened beast had had no intention of attacking her anyway and was only seeking its own escape, is one of those moot points that are never satisfactorily decided afterwards.

Moments later, eyes still tightly shuttered to avoid seeing what she could not escape from and the contents of the siphon beginning to ebb dangerously, she felt herself being hoisted upright again by helping hands that had come back belatedly to rescue her now that the acutest point of danger was past.

“Where did it go?” she shuddered, opening her eyes and looking blankly around at the carnage on all sides of her.

Brakes were screaming hectically out in the middle of the road. Somebody pointed. It had managed, almost miraculously, to breast the heavy evening traffic unharmed and get to the other side. She was just in time to see its loping black form, all the way across the Alameda, turn up into a threadlike little alley, a veritable crack between the buildings, that opened on that side, and disappear in the gloom.

“How are you going to get it back, senorita?” somebody asked fatuously, fanning her with his hat while a restorative was held to her lips.

Kiki flipped her hands violently downward, her face a mask of wreathed weeping. “I don’t
want
it back!” she screamed hysterically. “I don’t care if I never see it again! Look at the way I look!” She pawed helplessly at her disarrayed hair tumbling loosely down her shoulder. “Help me back to my car,” she sniffled after a moment or two. “I want to go home—”

Two of the men assisted her falteringly out to the edge of the curb between them, and the Packard was brought up. Manning, fortunately for himself, was no longer in it; he had jumped out to give chase, along with a few of the bolder spirits in the crowd.

Kiki flopped limply into the back seat, still weeping gently, or at least simmering in a resemblance to weeping, into a handkerchief held just under her mouth. For once she was not putting on any act; her nervous system had just received a bad shock, and she felt the way she was acting.

To complete the catastrophic misadventure, the main body of the crowd, as it ebbed back amidst the littered debris of the café terrace, had turned definitely unfriendly toward her, seeming to hold her personally responsible for ruining its
aperitif
hour. Hisses and boos could plainly be heard. And when a Latin crowd hisses you, it’s like bricks and rotten eggs up North.

A very disheveled, discredited, and thoroughly unnerved lady was driven away from the scene of the fiasco.

It had been plainly seen to enter that alley at the Alameda end, by dozens of people. There could be no doubt on that point. It was a chasm of a lane, winding its way back through derelict buildings. This was an old section in here, one of those leftovers that dot all large cities, in spite of its proximity to the fashionable and ultramodern Alameda.

It should, then, have been simply a matter of following it through to the other side, overtaking it, and holding it at bay—if not physically recapturing it—until the police had a chance to arrive. At least in keeping it in sight, if nothing else.

It wasn’t.

It was dusk, but the visibility was still fairish, even if dark-blue-tinted. The distance to be traversed wasn’t long. Not only that, but the more venturesome spirits in the crowd that had been around Kiki at the Globo, Manning at their head, were only moments behind it in pursuit.

Yet it had dropped from sight, been swallowed up, disappeared completely somewhere along that short byway, in one of the most built-up, hemmedin parts of the city! For when the advance posse, Manning still foremost, came surging out into the Plaza de los Mártires, a small, busy, palmbordered square that the alley gave onto at its other end, a case of mass astigmatism seemed to have resulted. And it was not one brought on by fright and excitement, as sometimes happens, either. The plaza was bustling with people, yet not one person could be found who had seen or heard anything amiss, much less anything so striking as a jet-black jaguar rushing headlong out of an alley mouth into their midst. A shoeshine boy less than a yard past the turn of the alley corner was kneeling industriously to his task over a customer’s raised foot. Both were close enough for the wind of its passing to have bowled them over. If it had passed. Nothing had, they both said in surprise. And then, not sure they had heard aright, repeated blankly, “A what?”, thinking Manning and the rest crazy.

Farther on, but not much farther on, the usual little knot of hopeful loiterers were scanning the lottery lists. People were getting on and off the noisy trolleys that seemed to fill this plaza at all hours of the day and night, emitting turquoise flashes from their overhead conduit wires as they backed and filled.

It was—the way it always was.

While the rearguard of the pursuit was still streaming in from the Alameda side, clogging up the lane, Manning and the advance guard tried to beat their way back through them, passing the word along as they went that it hadn’t come out at the other end.

Three gesticulating, whistle-blowing—and very belated—gendarmes now arrived to take charge, and the chase—or rather problem, for a chase requires something in front of it—now became an official one. Their explanation for their tardiness, and not an unlikely one, was that the report had been utterly disbelieved when it was first made known to them. A holdup, yes. A knifing. But a live jaguar running amuck through the streets? This was Ciudad Real. You better go someplace and sleep it off, or I’ll run you in.

Manning, momentarily leaving them to their own devices, buffeted his way straight through to the Alameda side again, to try to find the fellow from whom he had “borrowed” the thing earlier in the day, a ranch foreman named Cardozo, and who was supposed to meet him at a certain inconspicuous corner with one of the ranch produce trucks and take the thing off his hands again as soon as Kiki was through with it.

It took him only a few minutes to get down there, but the news was already there ahead of him, he found when he arrived.

“It’s gone,” he announced breathlessly. “It broke away from her, and nearly killed her in the bargain! That crowd you see up there right now is where they’re looking for it.”

“I know, somebody told me,” Cardozo said disgruntledly. “Somebody must have done something to it to get it started off like that. I
told
you not to let it get mauled around too much. I thought you said you were going to be right with it, the whole time she had it out with her.” He actually seemed peeved at losing the thing, as though he had grown attached to it.

“I wasn’t more than two car lengths away,” Manning answered heatedly, “and even then I couldn’t get over to her in time to stop it! I saw what it did. It took a flying leap over her body; the only thing that saved her was she had a bottle of charged water in her hands and squirted some at it. I thought you said it was so tame and harmless, there was nothing to worry about! It would have been a fine thing if it had clawed her up, wouldn’t it?”

“It was perfectly docile the whole time we had it out at the
estancia
. The cook’s kid used to go right in the pen and play with it by the hour.”

“When, two months ago?” Manning said bitterly. “Maybe it was growing up then. It sure came of age tonight!” He cut the discussion short, it being largely a spilt-milk matter by now. “Come on, there’s no use standing here wrangling about it. I came down here to get you, because I thought you might be a help in getting it back.”

“I’ve got a riata here in the back of the truck I was going to tie it up with on the trip back,” Cardozo assented. “I’ll bring it along, it might come in handy.”

“It disappeared in there somewhere,” Manning told him, as they made their way back to the hubbub on foot. “Where d’you think it lit to?”

“To know that, one would have to be a jaguar,” was the ranchman’s dry answer.

When they returned, order and organization were rapidly being brought out of the chaos. Order, but not any jaguar. The three gendarmes had already become five, and the five in no time at all became seven. Next a lieutenant of police arrived to take charge of this safari on city streets. Next, even one of the municipal fire trucks showed up; but this solely so that the beam of its highpowered searchlight, the strongest available on any piece of apparatus, could be trained into the alley to show them what they were doing. It lit it up with a strange pale blueness, making the weird affair seem even weirder. Finally—but this last of all and not for long hours yet—the curator of the zoo was sent for, to give technical advice and make suggestions, he presumably being an expert in such matters.

The obvious things were done first. The public at large was cleared out of the alley, with a great flourishing of police batons and repeated warnings of: “Move back, now. Nobody allowed in here, it’s dangerous. It may suddenly reappear when least expected and attack.” The majority of them needed no second urging. There was a confused milling about for a few moments, and then the alley was clear. Ropes were then stretched across it at both ends, to keep it that way.

The next step was a wholesale ordering out of all inmates who lived along it, for a house-to-house search was impending. Again the order didn’t have to be repeated. There was a panicky mass exodus from the disreputable warrens all along it, with bird cages, cooking utensils, and even potted plants.

These people were questioned personally by the police lieutenant as they were filed through. For the most part fruitlessly. There was no single case in which anyone had seen where it
went
. It had flashed through so suddenly that they all arrived at their windows too late; the clamor of the crowd in its wake was what had drawn them to look out, not any sound the beast had made. Two or three were found who admitted they had seen it coming in the distance—although they hadn’t known it for what it was, had taken it in the gloom for a large, rabid black dog. But even these were no help, though they had been right out in midalley at the time; they all gave the same answer. “Yes, I saw it coming
toward
me up ahead, and knew it was something bad because of all the hollering behind it. Where did it
go?
You think I waited to find out? I dove into the nearest doorway and slammed the door shut behind me. By the time I looked out again, it wasn’t there any more.”

At last, near the tail end of the procession of refugees, was found a little girl of ten or so who, when her turn came, promised to be of some help. For a moment they thought they had something. She had been at the window
in time
to see it, she insisted proudly, because she had been leaning out of it for a long time before that. “I saw something big and black coming down our street, from way up there.”