Black Alibi (29 page)

He waited until the waiter had put down their new jiggers, gone away again. “He was ripe for murder, anyway. The tinder was there, waiting. The jaguar was the spark. The spark came along and bang! all over the place. Every large city has dozens of his kind. Fortunately, most of them never blow a fuse. One in a hundred gets started off, and then you have it! Jack the Ripper in London. Bluebeard in France. That ax killer—what was his name?—in Germany.

“He got hold of it, anyway, and kept it for a while. They found its grave last night, in the earthen floor of one of those cells, before we came away, remember? And you heard what they told us they found after they dug it up.” He made a slicing motion. “The. forepaws had been amputated, and the head skinned—”

Belmonte quickly hoisted his brandy and cleaned it out.

“But I don’t think he did that right away, that curing and fashioning of the gauntlets and the mask. I think the first time he found some way of transporting it, under his control and still alive, to the vicinity in which the attack on Teresa Delgado occurred. In some car, or in some hamper, who knows how? Held it there by him in that pitchdark tunnel under the viaduct, waiting for the first likely passer-by to come along, and when she did—unleashed it to see what it would do. Probably he had starved it into a state of ferocity by then.”

“Then why didn’t it turn on him and not the girl?” asked Belmonte.

“He probably had something along to cow it with. He must have, to be able to recapture it immediately after its foray.”

“
Que barbaridad, hombre!
” Belmonte inhaled shiveringly.

“But that wasn’t enough for him. It was too brief, too vicarious. He couldn’t approach close enough, nor linger to gloat. It was too complicated. So he didn’t repeat that. But his blood was up now.
He
would be the jaguar instead. So he killed it, and from then on he was. With gauntlets that retained the death-dealing claws. He found some way of manipulating them, making them emerge and recede just as in nature—by tiny springs or wires, who knows just how?”

Belmonte passed his hand quickly across his eyes as if to shut out some too-insistent sight. He went on hastily, as if to get away from that particular phase of the subject, “How could he go around rigged up like that, though?”

“He didn’t, of course. You noticed that loose, enfolding overcoat with big pockets we found there last night. He probably muffled himself in that, took Out the paraphernalia at the last minute.”

“How is it he didn’t leave footprints?”

“Rags wrapped around his shoes would take care of that. But this is not really a police matter we are discussing, this is a case history in abnormal psychology. A case history that unfortunately did not come to light until too late. He needed, not policemen, but a doctor.”

“My revolver was the doctor,” Belmonte said, hardening his eyes.

“Yes, the best, and by that time, the only possible one.”

“How can anyone like that be detected?” Belmonte wondered aloud. “Could a person tell just by looking at him?” Then he answered it himself, “No, I suppose not.”

“Sometimes you can,” Manning mused. “If you’re smart, if you know what it means when you do. And you usually don’t. Sometimes you’ll catch an unguarded gleam in the eye for a moment, a glitter, a fervor, where you wouldn’t in anyone else’s. Oh, nothing much, and you’re not expecting it anyway, you’re trustful, you say to yourself you imagined it.”

“Did you ever see a telltale look like that in anyone’s eyes?” Belmonte asked him curiously.

“Yes, once, I remember now that I did. It was in a room at police headquarters. A room crowded with people. They were questioning a suspect. I was fiddling away with a file, listening. I hurt myself, here—” He ran a finger thoughtfully over a cicatrice still visible in the bulge below one thumb. “I came forward into the light, close to the suspect. All were repulsed by the bleeding, messy sight. But in the eyes of one man, and one man alone, I detected a certain unhealthy interest, a look that was almost an ogling. I thought I was mistaken at the time, and like a fool I let the impression go; it left me. But that was it, that was it, then and there, if I’d only realized.”

“And who was it, the suspect—of course?” Belmonte asked interestedly.

Manning took a moment to answer. He turned his empty brandy jigger upside down. “No, the man who was there to question the suspect. Police Inspector Robles.”

Belmonte’s face was a pucker of sudden white shock.

“And now you know,” the American said quietly. “As you’re entitled to. But that look on your own face right now is the look that will be on everyone else’s, when they hear it. It’ll be bad for the police, and worse for the public. So I think it’s better if we keep it where it is now: just between you and me and that shovelful of hot coals.”

He stood up and stretched himself in the healing, cleansing sunlight slanting down under the café awning.

His voice trailed off as if he didn’t want to talk about it any further. “Something that will never be mentioned again—but will always be there— between you, and me, and the bad dreams of out nights.”

“It’s beautiful now!” she exclaimed. “Come over here and look.”

He came up behind her, where she was standing, before the open full-length windows. She was gazing out with all the rapture attending a first discovery. And it was a first discovery in every sense of the word; she had never seen this place before, a cloud had darkened it until now.

They stood looking out in silence for a while, he at her shoulder. The lucent evening sky, the wavy black hills against the hidden blue gas flares left behind by the sunset. And nearer at hand, those streaks of luminous talcum, stretching away in narrowing perspective, that were the streets and bright cafés poor little Clo-Clo had known so well.

Her ghost must still be ambling along them right now, down there; but a pert, friendly sort of ghost, not a terrifying one, smiling and flipping her handbag jauntily at the passers-by she met.

“So you’re going back?” he said finally.

“I guess so. On the next boat. But that’s not for thirty days yet. What’re you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Stay down, I guess. Things seem to be opening up a little more for me now, since that happened. Belmonte and I are to share that reward offered by the municipal council, I told you that, didn’t I? And His Nibs the Commissioner has even offered me a job as a sort of special investigator without portfolio on his own immediate staff. And just to round out things full circle, I had a letter this morning from my old client, Kiki Walker, hinting that a little misunderstanding shouldn’t stand between friends and she’d be very glad to have me do publicity work for her again. What I’ll probably do is open a little agency of some sort, now that I’ve got capital. Typewriters or shaving cream or something very undramatic like that.”

“You should get yourself a girl and settle down.”

“I have already, but she doesn’t know it yet.”

“When are you going to tell her?”

One of his four or five cumbersome hands made vague motions behind her back, but without actually touching her. “Pretty soon now. Sometime within the next thirty days, before that boat leaves.”