Black Alibi (22 page)

Yes, the panic was on.

Manning knocked on 24. Her voice said, “Come in.”

She was in the middle of finishing packing her smaller pieces, the hand luggage. Three or four of them were ranged around her. She was in a white corduroy wrapper, tiny at the waist, spreading at the floor. She looked as though she hadn’t slept since that night, and he glimpsed several small bottles of nerve tablets or sedative ranged on the stand beside her bed.

Pallor and the darkness about her eyes only made her more beautiful. You had to be as young as she, he told himself, to suffer and still turn out looking beautiful. When you got to be a few years older, and suffered, it just made you haggard.

The first thought that crossed his mind, before he’d even opened his mouth to her, was: “What made me come here? I had no right to. I should have stayed away and let her alone.”

“You don’t remember me,” he said tactfully. “I’m the fellow—well, I was with them the other night.”

“Oh,” she said. Even the recollection still made her wince. “I thought it was somebody from the Express, about my reservation and tickets. No,” she admitted, “I don’t remember you.”

“I really had no right to intrude like this,” he murmured tactfully.

“No, it’s all right. I’m all alone here and—it’s nice to have someone to talk to in your own language.” She was not only sincere, she was almost pathetically grateful. “I was in bed all day yesterday. I only got up today because I had to—to complete the necessary arrangements for poor Sally.” Her voice shook a little when she pronounced the name. “Sit down, Mr. Manning.” She removed a small fitted toilet case from the seat of a chair.

“Won’t I be in your way?”

“Most of my heavy packing is finished. I’m taking the night train down; that doesn’t leave until ten, I understand. There’s plenty of time—as long as I make sure I get out of this place.” A look of unspeakable revulsion flitted across her face. “As long as I make sure I get out of this place!” Her intensity made her almost wild-eyed.

“I can understand how you feel,” he said sympathetically.

“It’s been pretty bad,” she went on in a more composed voice, sitting down and crossing her knees, but then robbing the attitude of all repose by plucking incessantly at the fabric of her white robe just over her kneecap. “I had all her things to put away. I could see imaginary rips and tatters on every—” She bit her lip, forbore going ahead.

He was acutely uncomfortable, as men always are in the presence of feminine emotion.

“And the trip up isn’t going to be easy either. It’s the same ship we came down on together and—well you know how it is.”

He supposed not, he said almost inaudibly. He felt as though he had six hands and feet.

“She’d looked forward so to this vacation,” she went on after a moment’s quiet. “The last few weeks, before we left, she kept coming over to my house nearly every other night, to show me some latest addition she’d made to her wardrobe, to plan some new detail. She was even taking Spanish lessons, at the end. And to have it end like this!”

He thought maybe it was better for her to get it all out of her system instead of keeping it pent up, didn’t try to change the subject.

“We’ve lived next door to each other ever since we were a pair of knock-kneed little brats with braces on our teeth. Went to school together, went to dances together. Her poor mother’s waiting up there now. And I’ve got to go back and face her. Bring her back in a
box
.” She did something to her shapely eyebrows with the fingers of one hand.

“Have you cabled?” he asked gently.

“Yes. I had to, of course. I didn’t say what it was. I couldn’t bring myself to. Not on teletype strips.” She halted, went on thoughtfully: “There’s something so unspeakable about what it really was.”

If you only knew, he concurred unheard.

“I let them think pneumonia. Now when I do get back, that’s another thing I’ll have to tell them.” Her voice trailed off, and in the silence he got up to go.

He really intended going without a word, without broaching what had been on his mind when he came here. Then unexpectedly, as he was already at the door, she gave him the opening he had no longer been seeking. “They haven’t caught it yet, have they?” she asked.

“No, they haven’t,” he answered, turning and looking square at her. “And they won’t.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because, Miss King, it’s not a jaguar,” he told her quietly.

She stared at him, intently for a long moment. He could see her already wan face paling still more, before his very eyes, as his meaning sank in with terrible slowness.

“Oh no,” she grimaced sickly at last, drawing the back of her hand across her lips, “I couldn’t bear that thought. If anything can make it worse than it was already—that does.”

“Shall I go ahead, or would you rather I didn’t?”

But the question was superfluous, he could see the damage was done already. She just kept staring at him in a frozen, furrowed horror. If he shut up now, he’d leave her with that anyway.

He lowered his voice. “It’s a man. No one else in Ciudad Real believes that but me, but I do. I say it now, and I’ll keep on saying it—anytime, anyplace, anywhere. It had already happened three times before the other night. I don’t know whether you know that or not; they may have tried to keep it from visitors because of the tourist season. But it’s common knowledge among us here.”

“I remember now, the clerk downstairs tried to warn us that night. But in a veiled way, without coming out openly with what he meant—”

“Do you think you can stand it if I—?”

“Yes, I think I want you to.”

By the time he had finished, he had marshaled every argument for her benefit that he had ever presented to Robles at any time, from beginning to end; every detail, every piece of evidence.

“I’m sure I’m right, I’ve got to be!” he said, slapping his own thigh fiercely. “But I can’t get them to listen to me. They’re as sure on their side as I am on mine. And they’re the police and I’m just—a loose guy.”

She took a deep, shuddering breath. She’d stood it well. Even better than he’d expected her to. Perhaps because it had been presented to her objectively, and not introspectively. There was horror in her eyes, but something else as well; a glint of something steely that hadn’t been there before. Call it hatred, call it fury. You don’t hate irrational animals.

He couldn’t tell whether he’d convinced her or not. She didn’t answer for a moment or two. Finally she said in a muffled voice, “To think that a human being, a thing calling itself a man—” And that was the answer, there.

He strode over to the open floor-length windows that Sally had stood looking out of only two nights before at this same time. The city sprang to view below, bejeweled with twinkling lights. Silver talcum seemed to blur the long vistas of the main avenues, and the cathedral reared its graceful twin turrets black against the rising apricot moon coming up over the hills.

“Pretty to look at, isn’t it?” he said, turning to her. “But out there on one of those lovely streets you see from here, some young girl is going walking tonight. Or is going to stand waiting for her sweetheart in some secluded, romantic spot. Or maybe is only going to stray away from a lively party for a few minutes, out onto a terrace or down into a garden for a breath of air. And you and I know the rest! A horrid thing on the ground will be all that’s left of her. And something that thinks like we do will gloat, safe in his hiding place— while the damn-fool police go around looking for a jaguar behind hedges and under rose bushes! If it isn’t tonight, it’ll be tomorrow night, or the night after. But it’ll happen again. Again and again and again!”

“And—?” she breathed fearfully. He could see she was steeling herself to ask it. “Why do you come here telling me this? I’ve already lost my own friend that way. I’m leaving here. Why do you tell me what’ll happen to the next girl? What is it you want
me
to do?”

He gave it to her curtly. “I want you to be that next girl. Be the bait for him, it, whatever you want to call him.”

Her eyes dilated. She drew back a step. “I think you’re out of your mind. Do you know what you’re saying? I can’t get out of this hateful place quick enough, as it is! I can’t wait to see the last of it! I can’t sleep nights. My baggage has gone down to the ship already. There won’t be another for the next thirty days. And you’re asking me to stay on here
alone
, by myself, after losing my lifelong friend! You, a stranger, have the nerve to walk into my hotel room and suggest, not only that, but that I go out deliberately looking for this—this abomination, seeking him, trying to attract him. All to give you the satisfaction of proving some theory of yours to be right!” Her voice rose. “Will you please leave? Will you kindly get out of here?”

“I’m going, Miss King,” he said acquiescently, without taking offense.

“Please do,” she urged coldly. “I should think you would have had the consideration to leave me alone. To go to someone else, at least. But to come to
me
, of all people—” Her closing of the door behind him cut the rest of it off.

It was still going on behind that other transom, too, as he repassed it on his way Out. “Well, then you’ll just stay on here alone, Harvey Williams, I’m warning you now! I’m going to be on that train at ten o’clock tonight and nothing’s going to stop me—!”

He didn’t blame her, whoever she was. He blamed Marjorie King even less. The one he blamed was himself, for approaching her with such a suggestion in the first place; he should have had sense enough to realize the state of mind she was bound to be in, after such an ordeal.

He strode out through the tiled lobby. The luggage pile in the center of it hadn’t diminished any, had augmented if anything. The clerk was nodding his head busily, with one of the spindly, nickel-trimmed Ericsson handsets held to the side of his face. Manning obliviously heard him snap his fingers in mid-conversation, but he had already gone past, thought it was meant for one of the bellhops.

He pushed out through the revolving door, stood for a minute under the glass entrance canopy, adjusting his hat. A dark-skinned bellboy hopped out after him, touched his arm. “Senor, the
direccion
—”

Manning went inside to the desk again. The clerk said, “Mees Keeng, she call down just as you go by. She ask for to have you go up again a minute if you don’t mind.”

No, Manning’s sudden hopeful grin answered for him, he didn’t mind. He didn’t mind at all. He took the stairs again, but this time by fives, at full leg-spread. The argument behind the ubiquitous open transom seemed finally to have been settled too. “Give me your pajamas, Harvey,” the same feminine voice as before was cooing, “there’s room enough left in my valise for them.”

Marjorie King had opened the door for him before he quite reached it, then turned back into the room again. She began on an oddly aimless note when he stepped over the threshold. “A funny thing happened just now, after you’d left. I thought I’d packed everything of hers away, but I happened to go to the closet and I came across this.” She was holding a small woolen vestee or half sweater, with exaggerated puff sleeves, aloft in her hand. “She was never without it. She knitted it herself, I used to watch her doing it. Every morning going down in the bus. The other night,
that
night, before we left, the last thing she said was, ‘Think I’ll need this?’

She wasn’t being weepy about it any more. There was a flinty decisiveness lurking underneath the quiet poignancy with which she spoke. “You see, Mr. Manning, she was the dearest friend I had in the world. I don’t think I’ll ever find anyone to quite take her place. What I’m trying to say to you is, if a man did that, and you think .by staying I can be of some help in—in settling accounts for her, well, I—I’m ready to be that
next girl
.”

“I don’t want you going into this blindly,” he warned her. “I know it’s asking a lot, and I know Robles would put a stop to it fast if he ever caught my trying such a thing. All you’ve got to do is say no, and I won’t blame you.” He waited, watching her.

“I’ve already given you my answer,” she said with quiet determination. “If it’s a man, I’m staying, I want to. If it’s a jaguar, a force of nature, something that doesn’t know what it’s doing, that can’t be called to account, then that’s a different matter entirely.”

“If it were a jaguar, you wouldn’t need to stay, it would have been caught by now, probably within twenty-four hours after it bolted into the Callejón.”

“All right, we begin.” She moved briskly to the transom, shut it tight. She went over to the phone, said “Send my baggage back upstairs, I’m staying.” And then in answer to something that was asked, she snapped the one word, “Indefinitely,” and hung up. On her way back to him again, she caught up her unbound hair and fastened it up the rear curve of her head, somewhat like a ship clearing its decks for action. It made her look a little more sophisticated, none the less beautiful. “Now!” she said. She sat down opposite him, head tilted attentively. The period of futile mourning was past, it was easy to see that. “Help yourself to those,” she said parenthetically, “if they help you to think better,” and motioned toward a pack of American cigarettes.

There was a moment or two of silence. She was the first one to speak. “To be the bait, he must be drawn to me next. Out of every girl and woman in this city. How are we going to manage that? How can I hope to succeed in attracting his attention?”

“You can’t if we just leave it to chance. The law of averages would be too strongly against it. You could walk the streets alone at night, every night for the next ten years; and he might strike all around you, but never come near you again. It must be a setup. Now here’s what my idea is. If he reads the papers at all, he’s sure to read the rehashes of his own monstrosities, if nothing else. He must have seen there were two of you that night, he must have followed you from the time you both left the restaurant. I’m wondering if there isn’t some way I can plant—but very subtly, so that he doesn’t scent a trap—in the newspapers, along with the accounts of your previous experience, the idea that you would be foolhardy enough, scatterbrained enough, to go back again to some such place, unaccompanied, even after what happened the last time. And along with an even defter hint that you got a look at him, would be able to identify him. In that way, there’ll be two powerful impulses pulling him toward you: his maniacal urge itself, whatever that is, and also his sense of self-preservation.”