Black Alibi (21 page)

Manning was at the
comandancia
within ten minutes.

The girl was sitting there in Robles’ office. She was obviously not normal yet, he could tell that at sight. Yet she was not weeping nor even noticeably nervous any longer. She seemed, continually, to be lost in thought. A strange icy calm seemed to have descended on her. She had a policeman’s uniform coat thrown over her shoulders like a cape, to hide the blood spats and rents on the upper part of her dress. Her unfastened hair, without being recombed, had been pushed back behind her shoulders. It made her seem about sixteen. There was no other woman with her, the municipal police department not yet having any policewomen attached to its staff.

His first thought was anyone’s first thought at sight of Marjorie King: what a beautiful person she was. But then he didn’t think any further of it after that once—for the present. He hadn’t gone there, naturally, to admire feminine beauty.

They weren’t introduced. He just asked her a tactful question in English, and that elicited the story. Then he repeated it in his fluent, if somewhat raffish and ungrammatical, Spanish for Robles, and it was taken down stenographically. Even the repetition of it to him, he noticed, seemed unable to alter the numbness of mind that gripped her. It was as though she were speaking by rote, without the words having any meaning to her. It reminded him of cases of shell shock he had heard of, where the effects were delayed from twenty-four to fortyeight hours.

Robles and his camarilla of specialists were now ready to repair to the scene, which had naturally been already under police supervision long ahead of this, awaiting his arrival.

“It will not be necessary—” he started to assure the girl through Manning, but to everyone’s surprise she showed a wish to go with them.

“It can’t do anything more to me than it has already,” she said, looking up at Manning.

He knew that she was addressing him and the rest of them without really seeing their faces, without differentiating among them as individuals at all.

“I don’t want to go back to that room and be alone there. Not just yet anyway. I can sit in the car, without getting out.”

In the end, because as she had pointed out she was no worse off in one place than in another, they allowed her to accompany them back. She sat in the rear, between Manning and Robles. The man that she had displaced rode outside, clinging to the top of the door frame.

The drive out to the Bosque was a grim and depressing one. They all felt heavy and sick and frustrated, faces broodingly downcast. Robles didn’t even have a stomach for doing very much crowing to Manning about the error in the latter’s whole thesis that this seemed to confirm once and for all, justified as he would have been in doing so.

“So I was right, you see,” was all he said, in a curiously listless undertone across Marjorie’s profile. “We’ve been holding Cardozo, and it’s hap. pened again right while he’s in custody. I’ll have to order his release at once.”

“I made no direct accusation against him, if you remember,” the American contented himself with remarking. “But the fact that it’s not Cardozo doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not a m—”

He refrained from finishing it. This was no time to wrangle over points of view, in the presence of this girl’s livid grief.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked her solicitously, as they swung around the
glorieta
of the Puerta Mayor in a half circle, and then in.

“I wasn’t hurt at all myself,” she answered simply. “These stains are from twigs and leaves that smirched me when I went in there—where she was.”

Robles had caught the sense of the remark by following the gesture of her hands. “You went
in there
, immediately afterwards?” he gasped in amazement. “But didn’t you realize it could very well have attacked you, too? It must have been still lurking near by.”

She looked at the two of them as though she didn’t understand, when Manning had repeated it for her. “But she was my friend,” she said. “I forgot about being frightened. You don’t go off and leave your friend behind—even when it’s too late.”

“
Es admirable
,” Robles commented softly, in an aside.

“
Ya lo creo
,” the American nodded vigorously.

“You saw her?” They exchanged a look of consternation, knowing what it had been like three times before now.

“Enough to know that—it was over,” she whispered. “It was dark, and I didn’t have to see too much. It hadn’t dragged her very far, just off the road into some ferns. I—I could see her foot sticking out through them.”

Robles’ own troubles came uppermost in his mind again. He bunched a fist against his forehead in despair. “I may as well hand in my resignation tomorrow,” he muttered to Manning. “We were all warned, you heard what he said—”

“You’ve got something more to go by than you’ve had the times before, at least,” Manning tried to encourage him. “For the first time you have a surviving witness to one of these attacks. Miss King may be able to help you in some unforeseen way.”

“It isn’t that we need to be told anything about it!” Robles insisted heatedly. “What is there that we need to be told about it, anyway? This isn’t a human murder case that depends on such things as identification, witnesses, alibis, fingerprints. It’s that we haven’t been able to catch the thing so far, that’s all!”

“Stubborn jackass!” rasped Manning shorttemperedly, turning his head away.

“Blind fool!” snapped the police inspector.

Somebody came out into the road ahead and flagged them with a pocket light to show that this was the place. The car drew up at the roadside and the men all got out. The girl remained in it, sitting in the middle of the spacious back seat, looking very alone there. She sat staring dry-eyed at nothing, Manning noticed, giving her a last glance as he followed the others down the road and into the thickets.

A tiny constellation of pocket torches, only a short distance in, marked where the advance guard were awaiting their arrival, around the inscrutable ferns that formed the bier.

They went over one by one and had their look. It was the same thing over; an attack of ravening ferocity that hadn’t stopped with mere death, that had continued, insatiable, long past it.

“This thing must be suffering with the jungle equivalent of rabies,” one of the men shuddered. “To shoot it down is not enough, it should be cauterized over a slow fire.”

“It should be caught first,” Robles seethed.

He and Manning emerged and went back to the car. “Better get the girl out of here before they bring the stronger lights,” the American suggested. “She has been through enough already without that.”

“Where are you stopping, Miss King?”

“Tell him the Inglaterra Hotel.”

“Hold yourself at our disposal for the next few days, that is all. You may go now.”

The departmental car turned and drove back with her. The two men retreated into the thickets again.

One of Robles’ subordinates shouted out suddenly, “I have found a print! And what a one!” And as they all came converging upon him with a rush, Manning included, he added knowingly: “Maybe this will shut up your American friend, eh
mi comandante?
” He was holding his torch trained steadily downward on it. It was in a soft green bed of moss, not far from the body; the nearly perfect imprint of a gigantic cat’s paw— somewhat like a three-leaf clover.

Robles turned on Manning almost savagely, as though taking out his frustration on him. “
Now
tell me that wasn’t made by a jaguar, I defy you to!”

“It was made by a jaguar,” acquiesced Manning glumly. But then a moment later he continued: “It is too late in the game to ask me to change my viewpoint. I have seen too much that supports it. Now this, for example: these two girls running along one behind the other, the second one nearly at the first one’s heels. You heard what she said back at your office. She didn’t hear a sound. She didn’t even know the girl was missing until she had turned her head. Well? I don’t care how swiftly it sprang on her, downed her right behind her friend’s back, she would have had time to give her death cry at least, to gasp, to gurgle. The sound of the fall alone would have been heard by the foremost girl. Why wasn’t it? Because there
was
no fall. She was
lifted
, not felled. And there is only one way she could have been seized quickly enough to prevent both those things: the fall of her body and the instinctive cry of extinction— and that is by prehensile human hands closing around her windpipe, cutting off sound,
hoisting
her off her feet into the underbrush.”

Robles advanced toward him almost with personal menace. “Do you realize that one blow from those terrible paws could crush her skull like an egg, kill her instantly?”

“Not instantly enough to keep a dying gasp, at least, from getting out. Sound is formed in the throat, not the head. It can only be cut off by constriction at the windpipe itself. And then what about the muffling of the fall? One goes down under a blow. She was transported erect, I tell you. She wasn’t felled by the leap of an animal, she was snatched bodily off her feet in mid-career—by something upright itself!”

“Do you hear him? He’s still looking for a man in this.” Robles motioned offensively toward him with a jerk of his thumb. Then he waved him off. “Don’t waste my time. I respected you until now, but you get worse as you go along. You’re making me lose all regard for your intelligence. We found hairs of the jaguar’s pelt on Teresa Delgado. We found the broken tip of its claw imbedded in Conchita Contreras’ throat. We have found prints similar to this one on the ground about all of them. The laboratory has even found traces of bloodpoison germs in their lacerations, such as these carnivorous animals are known to carry about imbedded in their claws. Do we have to sit the thing upright in your lap to get you to agree to its existence!”

“Man alive!” the American burst Out exasperatedly. “There are signs all around you, big as life, and you won’t take the trouble to see them, you’re so dazzled by that Crusoe-like footprint of yours! I don’t even carry a badge, but I can see them; why can’t you? For instance, look at that broken sprig there, bent down at right angles. That says what, to you
gente?
”

Robles curled his lips disdainfully at the naďveté of such a question. “It was swept aside and dislocated by the passage of the jaguar.”

“Ah. And what was the jaguar doing, walking upright on its hind legs?” snarled Manning. “One of you stand over there alongside of it. Any one of you, it doesn’t matter which. These ferns all around underfoot make the actual ground level bard to establish.”

He fairly yelped his satisfaction when the comparison had been effected. “Look at that! It’s even better than I thought. There’s a depression there under the ferns, a trough in the ground! Your man’s a five-and-half-footer and that dangling sprig is at the level of his shoulder. What a twostory jaguar that must be, to have broken it up there at that height!”

If he expected this to hold them, he was sadly mistaken. Robles didn’t even pay him the compliment of having to think twice, faltering for an instant before he came back at him. “Y que?” he drawled. “Must it follow the contour of the ground? Is it a worm or snake? It wasn’t crawling flat on its belly. Those two girls were in full flight and it was leaping headlong after them. What does any quadruped do in such a case? It vaulted over this hollow in the ground, its arched back swept that sprig aside, broke it.”

Manning flung the undersides of his hands toward him. “You can have your jaguar! You’re welcome to it.” He took a few steps away, stopped long enough to deliver a parting shot. “Just trace its movements for a second. From the Callejón de las Sombras, where it originally disappeared, around to the Pasaje del Diablo, in the working. class quarter. From there, all the way around again to All Saints Cemetery on the southern outskirts of town. From there all the way across the city to the corner of Justicia and San Marco. And from there, back once more to the Bosque, here on the north side. All without being seen once! Here’s another thing. All its victims have been women. Not old, not even middle-aged, but all young girls. That’s a very precocious jaguar, caballeros. It seems to specialize.” He turned his back on them with finality. “But there’s no use talking to you. It’s just a waste of good breath. I’m going home.”

“I’m sure we’ll be practically helpless without you,” Robles called after him sarcastically.

VI. Black Alibi

Manning at sight suspected some of the luggage of being hers when he stepped into the Inglaterra from the street. It was in the center of the tiled patio, and a glimpse of a red “M K” on the corner of one of the pieces confirmed his suspicion. There seemed to be, however, an unusual amount of it, and more was being added to it every time the creaking lift came down.

He went over to the desk. “Is that the
americana
, the one whose friend—?”

“She and everyone else, senor,” the clerk said dolefully. “We are being emptied like the—how you say?—epidemic is here. Twenty-three rooms in last two hours—”

Manning was only interested in one of the twenty-three check-outs. “Hpw soon is she leaving, do you know?”

“She take the
Santa Emilia
from Val, on Tuesday.” He shrugged pessimistically. “She cannot be blamed, senor, no?”

“No,” Manning agreed, lowering his head, “she cannot be blamed. I guess I’d go, too.” He took out a cigarette, looked down at it thoughtfully without using it. Then he looked up again. “I wonder if she’ll see me.”

“I try, senor. Whose name shall I say?”

She probably wouldn’t remember his name, from amidst all that horror the other night. She wouldn’t have salvaged it. He gave it anyway.

“Mees Keeng, is Mister Manning here to see ju.” The clerk nodded. “The twenty-four, senor, on secon’ floor.”

Manning took the stairs. The lift was still busy disgorging luggage at every down trip. As the clerk had said, there seemed to be a mass exodus on.

In fact, as he passed the open transom of a door on the second-floor corridor, he overheard an unmistakably American voice, feminine, saying to someone: “I don’t care, Harvey Williams, business deal or no business deal, I will not spend another night in this city with that thing prowling around loose! You can sign those papers just as well down on the coast while we’re waiting for the ship to sail—”