Black Alibi (3 page)

An alert conclave formed about her for a moment. “Where did it go? Where did it disappear to?”

“I don’t know. I ran inside to call my brother to come and see it, and when we came back it wasn’t there any more.”

The conclave split open again, like an overripe pod.

It would have to be ferreted out by a house-tohouse search, the lieutenant in charge decided. The only tenable assumption left was that it had found some doorway, crevice, gap, somewhere along these moldering walls, had sidled in, and was still lurking somewhere in one of the shadowy interiors, perhaps in a basement, perhaps in some unused flue, perhaps in the cavity under a staircase—there was no electricity anywhere along this cranny, inside or out—breathing latent death.

The search began from the Alameda end—it was nearing eight by then—and it was well on the way toward midnight by the time the posse emerged from the last house of all, flanking the Plaza de los Mártires—empty-handed. The search had failed as completely as the original pursuit had. It had been thorough, even if not successful. They had gone from top to bottom and from bottorn to top of every building along the way, flashing lights into corners, tapping walls, poking aside crates and boxes and litter, revolvers and stout clubs ready at hand to deal with it if it should turn, up. But it didn’t.

The crowd behind the ropes at each end, peering down the hazy blue pathway of the fire-fighting headlight, would hold its collective breath each time while they were inside, the wink of torches through the windows showing their progress tier by tier. Then they would come out again, report, “Not in that one,” to their commanding officer, the structure would be given a clean bill of health, and they would go trooping into the next. Finally the dramatic effect began to wear off, after the numerous repetitions. Here and there someone turned away and went about his business; it was getting late. Someone in the thinning ranks of onlookers was heard to suggest half facetiously that maybe it had esconced itself in the back of some cart or vehicle that had been left standing there with its rear open, been inadvertently shut in by the driver on returning a moment later and all unknowingly transported out of the neighborhood. The only trouble with this theory was that there had been no such fortuitous conveyance in the alley at the time; they could be sure of this for the very good reason that the place wasn’t wide enough to admit anything but a pushcart. Someone else suggested that maybe it had gone up in a balloon, and drew a big laugh. A spirit of skepticism began to make its appearance among the last ditch spectators, cheated of the excitement they had expected and taking it out that way. “Maybe it went into the church to say its prayers!” someone called down the alley through cupped hands.

The little church he had reference to sat at the end of a small cul-de-sac, down toward the Plaza de los Mártires end. The alley bent sharply in direction several times during its short length. At one of these bends it forked in two, in appearance though not in actuality. One branch of the fork was simply a brief dead end, coming up against a wafer-thin chapel, San Sulpicio, dating from colonial days. In other words, simply an inset, a niche, lying off the main course of the alley, only a few meters in extent.

This chapel was the least likely of all places along there for it to have found refuge. For one thing, it was no longer in use, having been abandoned years before at the time of some damage received during some long-forgotten earthquake. Its stout mahogany door, however, was still intact; it took them the better part of half an hour to force it with crowbar and chisel. It had been unopened for as long as the memory of the oldest dweller around there could stretch. And within, when they had dislodged it finally, they found simplY a desolate litter of rotted pews and fallen plaster within a roofless shell through which the stars peered. It could neither have got in here in the first place, nor, if it once had, have got out again from the foursquare stone cell that was all the place offered.

They came out again, brushing their whitened sleeves, coughing and sneezing, one man nursing a scorpion bite on the back of his hand.

Moments later, the Plaza de los Mártires had been reached; the search was perforce at an end.

The sensation-hungry idlers began to melt away with increasing rapidity. Midnight tolled from a belfry here, a belfry there. The long-maintained fire-equipment spotlight suddenly blanked out, the vehicle drove away. The ropes were taken down. The inhabitants were allowed to return. Oil lamps, kerosene, and candles winked here and there from within the fumigated buildings as they resumed occupancy. They stood for awhile in small clusters outside their doors, talking it over. Then these too disbanded as they went in one by one to their respective abodes to sleep. The alley returned to normal.

The majority of the police were withdrawn. One man was left posted, for the rest of the night, at each end of the alley, though for what purpose, it was hard to conjecture.

The night wore on toward its predestined finish, just as every night before it had in its time.

At any rate, only one thing was certain, so far, out of the whole episode. The jaguar had not been recaptured. The jaguar, therefore, must still be at large somewhere or other.

Morning came, and in its confidence-inspiring light a different view began to be taken of the whole thing. The brilliant, sunny daylight killed fears and vapors. It seemed incredible that such a fantastic thing
could
have happened. Ciudad Real was a town of natural-born skeptics anyway. By the time the morning coffees and
pan dulce
had been swallowed everywhere, a rumor had spread that the whole affair had simply been a publicity hoax perpetrated by Walker and her press agent. Like the usual actress’ missing-jewels stunt. That this did not take into account what had actually become of the fleet-footed quadruped did not impair its ready acceptance; it spread from mouth to mouth. Even those who the night before had been the first to lock their doors and peer anxiously under their beds were the first to say: “I knew it all along.
You
didn’t believe it, did you?” Whereupon the other fellow scoffed, “Of course not, what do you take me for?” In spite of the fact that there were dozens of eyewitnesses, the rumor very nearly succeeded in downing the reality. The very eyewitnesses themselves felt selfconscious after a while when they tried to insist they’d seen it. They began to wonder privately if they actually had, after all.

The newspapers, those barometers of public opinion, helped to disseminate this point of view. They all carried items about it, but treated it humorously, tongue in cheek. “The great jaguar scare”; “Who has Miss Walker’s jaguar? Will somebody please return it?” were some of the headings. People greeted one another facetiously all over town with: “Well, have you seen the jaguar yet?”

The police, keeping their own counsel, may have preferred it so. It at least saved them from the nuisance of dozens of hysterical false alarms all clay long. This way, not one came in. They noticeably didn’t discontinue the search altogether, a Sure sign that there was something to look for, after all. Only it became more diffuse; it was harder for the man in the street to tell just what they were doing, now that there was no longer any one particular locality, such as the alley, for them to concentrate on.

Manning, through all of this, had had a most unpleasant twenty-four hours of it. Not only was he detained in jail all of that first night, charged with violating some ancient city ordinance or other that prohibited the conveying of wild animals through the streets without a permit, haled into court in the morning, severely lectured for his misdemeanor, and fined a nominal sum before he was released; but he was also out of his job with Kiki Walker.

She made this known to him in no uncertain terms over the transom of her locked hotel-suite door when he tried to get in to see her the night after the debacle. Her voice came through ringingly; in fact so ringingly that other doors here and there along the hotel corridor began to open curiously after a moment or two.

“You’ve got your nerve coming around here again, after what happened! You’ve made me the laughingstock of the whole town, I want you to know! Beat it! Take your bright ideas somewhere else!”

“Now look, Kick, I didn’t arrange to have it happen that way purposely, you know,” he tried to reason with her.

“You got my pictures in the paper all right!” her voice went on wrathfully. “Did you see the one in the
Grafico?
Flat on my behind with my legs up in the air, and squirting a stream of seltzer water through them! When the curtain goes up at the theater next week,
that’s
what everyone’ll see—and not the performance that’s going on before their eyes! I’ll be laughed off the stage!

“I’ll come back when you’ve cooled off,” he said stiffly. “You don’t have to make a scene like this, with everyone looking out of their rooms snickering at me.”

“And what about me, out in the middle of the Alameda, with the whole town taking it in?”

“All right, I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, trying to keep relations between them intact, no matter how brittle they had become. It was his livelihood, after all.

“You’ll see me never!” What he didn’t realize, and perhaps she didn’t herself, was that it wasn’t the jaguar episode that was basically the cause of her tempestuous indignation. It was really that first meeting of theirs. He’d seen her when she was broke, down on her luck, unable even to buy herself a cup of coffee. She’d never been able to forgive him for that. “There’s your back salary. There’s no reason for you to come around any more now. We’re quits!”

A handful of large disks, Ciudad Real silver pesos, sprinkled over the open transom and rolled about in all directions over the corridor. One or two of those standing in the doorways helpfully stopped them for him with their feet. A scattering of paper money had fluttered down more slowly in their wake.

He wasn’t above picking it all up, every last scrap of it. He’d worked hard for that money, and in a way that basically wasn’t suited to his temperament or talents. He needed it. And he didn’t know where the next was coming from.

“All right, Kick,” he said with injured dignity. “Lots of luck to you, if that’s the way you feel about it.”

The transom panel snapped shut with a sharp little crack. He turned up his coat collar at the back of his neck, shoved his hands deep into his pockets, and trudged disconsolately away from there.

When a man has lost his job, the first thing he thinks of, usually, is to go out, have a drink, and take the edge off his troubles. Manning did that now too. Only he found he wasn’t even to be allowed to forget the damnable affair in peace.

He went into a place a few short blocks from her hotel.

“Well,” asked the barman, grinning with what was intended to be sociable jocularity, “have you seen the jaguar yet?”

Manning put down his drink abruptly, as though it sickened him. He gave the bartender a look in kind, as though he did, too. He snapped down a coin, turned around, and walked out without saying anything and went somewhere else.

Again he ordered. Again the barman, trying to make him feel at home, began cheerily: “What’s the latest on the jaguar?”

Again Manning put down his drink short, scowled, and turned on his heel.

At the third place he beat the barman to the punch. “I want two things,” he said bitterly. “A whisky and water, and not to hear about the jaguar. Will you do that for me, try not to mention it? I came in here to forget it.” He drew an imaginary line through the air, lengthwise to his own face. “
Terminado
. Finished. It’s over.”

But it wasn’t.

Night brooded enigmatically over Ciudad Real, seeming to hold its breath. Three quarters of a million people, and somewhere in the midst, shadow slim, with velvet tread, and fangs for those who crossed its ill-omened path—

II. Teresa Delgado

Even the Senora Delgado’s trusty broom handle, that persuader of last resource, seemed to have very little effect tonight in getting her oldest girl to do her bidding. She reached threateningly toward it, and that alone was usually sufficient impetus to start her toward the door. Tonight it failed to. Next she picked it up and brandished it. Even that failed. She finally was driven to actually swinging it at the recalcitrant one’s calves in order to drive her before her. Even this was a partial failure. The girl simply moved nimbly from side to side, but gave very little ground. Most of the light passes struck emptily against the wall, the girl avoiding being in the way each time.

There was always reluctance, dilatoriness, strife, whenever any question of going out on an errand arose. But tonight there was more than that. There was a deadlock, a form of passive resistance. Such opposition had never before been met with. Something stronger than fear of her mother’s light broom whacks seemed to be holding the girl back.

She crouched in implicit unwillingness against the wall, large brilliant black eyes fixed imploringly, yet inscrutably, on her mother the whole time she continued to side-step the broom’s corrective promptings. She was fairly tall for her age, and particularly her racial antecedents; already full-grown in height if not yet in girth. She was about eighteen or seventeen. Or perhaps sixteen; they didn’t keep very strict count of ages in this household. Her skin was the pale gold of wheat, but would probably darken slightly as she grew older. She had donned a
rebozo
* [A shawl, almost invariably blue in color, worn coifed over the head and with one end flung back behind its opposite shoulder.] —the ubiquitous head covering of lower-class Latin American girls and women—as a first step toward going out, but beyond that one preliminary she seemed unwilling or incapable of going.

Her mother began to poke the broom forward at her now, its broadside swipes having failed of effect. She was shrilly denunciatory as she did so. “Three times I have asked you already! Will you go?” She lunged. “Has any other woman in town got such trouble with her children? Why do you afflict me like this, Teresa? What is it that has gotten into you tonight? Is it so much to ask you to bring back a little charcoal from the
tienda
, that your poor father may find his food hot when he comes back from working hard? You could have been there and back already, twice over!”