by Todd Downing
He lit another cigarette, made a grimace of distaste from surfeit and stared through the haze of smoke at the result. The expression on his face was one of perplexity. Something, he had told himself at first, was wrong. Now he knew that nothing could be wrong. Although not skilled in fingerprint classification he knew that the evidence before him was, as he had told Arnhardt, incontrovertible. He was, for the moment, at a loss as to how to proceed. He found himself on the verge of indulging in fantastic explanations of the prints which he had found on the caramels.
He got up and placed the various objects carefully in the suitcase. The water bottle, being too large for this, he put in the bottom of the wardrobe. He set the suitcase beside it, locked the wardrobe, switched off the light and walked into the darkness that had blanketed the patio with the disconcerting suddenness of tropical latitudes.
The mingled aroma of flowers engulfed him, enervating as clouds of incense.
Ann Tolman was leaning against the side of the open door of Falter’s office, staring out into the patio.
“How is he?” Rennert asked as he came up.
“Resting a little, I think. At least he seems to be.” Her voice was lifeless.
“Has he quit talking about the yellowness of things?”
“Yes, that seems to have passed now.” She put a hand up to her forehead. “I feel so helpless, not knowing what to do.”
“None of us know, Mrs. Tolman.”
“If you will give me a cigarette,” she said, “I’ll go out in the patio and smoke. It’s so close in here that I’m getting a headache.”
The flare of the match as Rennert held it showed the white tube vacillating between her lips. They strolled side by side to the fountain and rested on its edge.
She said nothing for a time but kept her gaze fixed over the tip of the cigarette.
“You have been very kind to me, Mr. Rennert.” She spoke with sudden decision.
“About this afternoon?”
“Yes, not pressing me for an explanation.”
“It was none of my concern, you know. I have the ordinary amount of curiosity but no more, I trust.”
“Yet you know what I started to do?”
“Yes.”
“I would have denied it, of course, if you had told. But Steve, my husband, would have known it was true. I think he suspects, as it is. Since you kept still I feel as if I should tell you.”
“As you wish.”
“I suppose you think that suicide is cowardly—like most people who have never been tempted to solve things that way?”
“I believe that is a question which every individual must solve for himself, Mrs. Tolman. In your case, I think that the form of suicide you contemplated took a great deal more courage than living, unless living is a very terrible burden for you.”
She was silent for a long time, drawing avidly upon the cigarette.
“It has been a terrible burden for a long time. I’ve been able to bear it, though, until lately. It has been the heat the last week—and the deadly monotony of just existing, with no purpose at all, with no hope. I’ve thought sometimes that I would go mad, just for want of someone to talk to about it, someone who might suggest a way out.”
Her voice was unrecognizable, so charged was it with intensity. Rennert knew that she was scarcely aware of his identity, that he was serving simply as a channel along which her pent-up emotions could flow. Wisely he kept silent.
“Steve is a consumptive. I suppose you know that. Neither of us has any money. The doctors told him that he had to go to a drier climate. We borrowed enough to get to Texas. Steve got a job with this company of Solier, Falter, and Stahl, keeping books. Things were going along well for us, we were saving up a little money and Steve was feeling better. Then,” she stopped, caught hold of herself and went on, “they said that Steve had been stealing money from the company. Mr. Solier seemed very kind about it, said they wouldn’t have him arrested since they knew how badly he needed the money. He said they would send him down here to draw up plans for a hotel. They had found out that he had had training as an architect, you see.”
With a quick movement she drew the cigarette from her lips and flicked ashes into the night. Her voice was unsteady with anger.
“Mr. Rennert, I know you are working for these men. I don’t care. They are dishonest. Steve didn’t take that money and they knew it. They just shipped him off down here so that everyone would think he was guilty and there wouldn’t be any investigation. They were dishonest in this hotel business, too. They knew all the time the highway wasn’t coming through here. They just put out all that fine prospectus to get people’s money. I was thinking tonight, while I was in Mr. Falter’s room, that in his place I’d be afraid to die—if there is another life beyond the grave.”
“And yet you have been wearing yourself out nursing him.”
“I suppose it isn’t consistent with my feeling but I couldn’t see anyone suffer without doing something to relieve him—no matter who he is.”
She let the cigarette fall and ground it with her shoe. With its extinguishing some of her energy seemed to go. Her voice was suddenly weary.
“This morning Steve and I talked things over. The summer rains are coming, you know, and he must get away. He thinks that if he could get to Santa Fe, up in New Mexico, he could find some work building cottages for people who go there to write. But there’s not money enough for both of us to get there. I have a little life insurance. This afternoon an idea came to me all of a sudden. If I were to die—by accident—Steve would get that money and could make another start. I tried to sleep after that but I couldn’t. It was so hot, just as if a storm were brewing. I walked out into the patio then and—saw the snake.” A shudder went through her. “I thought that would be the easiest way. No one would ever suspect that it wasn’t an accident. If you hadn’t come along everything would be settled now.”
She spoke without emotion, as if it were a simple statement of an inevitable turn of events.
Rennert said quietly: “I was right, Mrs. Tolman. There was no cowardice in what you contemplated doing. I respect you for it.”
She rose and said in a flat voice: “Thanks. Don’t go on, though. There’s nothing more to say.”
They walked toward the lighted doorway.
“I noticed,” Rennert said, “that you did not include Mark Arnhardt among the others associated in this company when you accused them of dishonesty.”
She stopped short.
“No, he had nothing whatever to do with it,” her tone was quickly defensive. “It was Solier and Falter and Mark’s stepfather, Mr. Stahl. Why, it has only been in the last few weeks that Mark has even had any interest in the company. Oh, but what’s the use of talking about him?”
She turned and walked rapidly to the door. When Rennert got there she was disappearing into Falter’s bedroom.
He went to the desk, pulled open the upper drawer and took from it the pasteboard box. If, as he believed, these tablets had been the means of poisoning Falter, it would be dangerous to leave them there. He slipped them into a pocket and started to close the drawer. As he did so his eyes fell on the holster. He jerked the drawer further open so that the light fell full upon it.
The holster was empty.
“What’s the matter?” Ann Tolman had come back into the room and must have seen the grim look on his face.
He closed the drawer and walked around the table to her.
“I told you, Mrs. Tolman, that I admired your courage this afternoon. This isn’t the way, however. It’s utter folly, from any viewpoint you wish. If it is judged suicide your husband will not benefit by the insurance money. If it passes as murder someone else will suffer.”
She stared at him, a puzzled frown on her face. “What do you mean?”
“When I was in this room last there was a pistol in that drawer. It’s not there now.”
“Oh!” she raised a hand slowly to her throat. “And you think that I—But I didn’t!”
She looked him straight in the eyes. “I give you my word I didn’t take it. I didn’t even know it was there.”
For a long moment their eyes held.
“Do you believe me?” she asked.
Rennert nodded.
“Yes, Mrs. Tolman, I believe you.” He glanced at the closed bedroom door. “You were in there several times tonight, I suppose?”
“Yes, every few minutes.”
“With the door closed?”
“Either closed or partly so. I didn’t want any noises to disturb him.”
“Did you hear anyone enter this room?”
“Yes, I did,” she said hastily. “Someone came in while I was in the bedroom. About an hour ago, it was. I supposed it was someone wanting to ask about Mr. Fatter. When I came out in a few minutes there was no one here.” The color drained slowly from her face. “It must have been someone who wanted that gun—”
“Obviously it was someone who wanted that gun very badly.”
Rennert went through the patio again, walking with lagging steps. He stopped in front of the door of the sala, where he had watched the green worm crawl toward the yellow marigolds.
The elusive memory that he sought had come closest down the labyrinth of thought at that moment. He felt that there was need-imperative need—for haste in its capture now that behind one of these doors there was a loaded gun.
That doctor on the train had been talking about his work in a little town along the Gulf. About the terrible fatality among native children—
Then it clicked and he knew how Stahl and Miguel had died, how Tilghman Falter was dying, slowly, irremediably.
He turned and went into the sala. He switched on the radio and for twenty minutes, regardless of assigned hours of broadcast, called Solier’s San Antonio station.
Static was his only answer.
Finally he gave it up. Cold realization came in a douche. His call had been an SOS with a man’s life the forfeit. Now until daylight the hacienda was shut off from communication, the knowledge that he had gained of little use in the face of his helplessness to stay further attacks.
And the worst of it was that he had no idea from what quarter they were coming.
18
Hibiscus
Bertha Fahn closed her door and groped through the darkness for the light switch. She found it, pressed it and stood very still in the center of the room, telling herself that she must not give way to the feeling of panic that was beginning to surge through her.
She always felt it when she watched the darkness closing in on her, heavy, almost palpable, emphasized by the stars that hung such an incalculable distance away. Tonight it was worse. There were no stars. Across the courtyard one man lay dead and another, perhaps, dying. A little shiver went through her at the recollection of the way Mr. Falter had stared at her over the dinner table, of the way he had fallen forward, his hand overturning the white carnations.
She made her decision quickly, had made it really before she came into the room. She would leave the hacienda the next day. Now that her work was almost completed there was nothing to keep her in this place which at first had seemed so beautifully to embody the romantic. She wanted to see long vistas of electric lights again, to feel pavement under her feet, and about her the reassuring surge of the city.
She stared at the blackness framed by the window, wishing that there were blinds. A person could stand out there in the night and watch her—
Resolutely she put that thought out of her mind. If she were going to leave in the morning she would have to finish as much of her task as possible tonight, prepare everything so that there would be no chance of a slip-up at the border. She had worked so hard these long hot days that the thought of a last-minute discovery was unbearable. Long ago she had faced and conquered conscientiously the ethical problem of what she was doing. Science (the word always stood before her capitalized) was greater than man, existing without his creation. Its servants were (or ought to be) beyond the petty restrictions of laymen. The researcher in his laboratory, for example, experimenting with guinea pig.…
She went to the scarred wardrobe trunk in the corner and pushed it open. She took from about her throat a thin gold chain to which was attached a small key. She inserted this in the lock of the lower compartment and drew out a deep tray.
She carried it to the table under the electric bulb and put it down beside the solitary hibiscus flower that raised its red petals out of a thin vase of blue Jalisco glass. She picked up the topmost of three heavy albums and laid it on the top of the table. From a drawer she took a stick of wax, a candle and a packet of matches.
She sat down and opened the album flat upon the table. At her left hand she put a little stack of transparent glazed envelopes and at her right a neat pile of postcards. She eyed the postcards and frowned. There wouldn’t be enough, just as she had calculated. She would have to ask Mr. Rennert for those which he had brought.
She started to get up, hesitated, and looked at her watch. Surely he wouldn’t be going to bed so early. Still, he had had a long trip that day and would doubtless be tired. On the other hand, being from the city, he would be accustomed to late hours. She got up. But men here in the tropics lounged about in their rooms with such a disregard for clothing. Once when she had gone into Mr. Falter’s office he had been lying in the bedroom, with the door open! Hastily she sat down again, solving her dilemma by postponing its solution.
Carefully opening one of the envelopes she took out a dried flower. It was a small thing, with four dark brown petals that looked now like withered skin. One brown leaf still clung to the short stalk.
She laid it flat upon one oblong section of the blank album. She took one of the postcards and applied the tip of the piece of wax to the flame of the candle. When it had begun to melt she applied the end to four places near the edges of the reverse side of the card. She inserted the corners of the card into the slits designed for them and pressed down. She raised her hand in a moment, then passed her fingers lightly over the surface. It was held firmly in place. Under its smoothness no one could feel (unless after extremely careful examination) any protuberance to show that the flower was there.
It was, she thought, an admirable idea of hers, one that would enable her to carry back some of the fruits of her labors.…
She worked on, her fingers growing more nimble with repetition.
These flowers, sought after in the recesses of the rocks, along drying arroyo beds, had taken on personalities for her. Each recalled the event of its discovery, when it had given up the long game of hide-and-seek and had let her find it.
The last of the postcards was in place and she sat in a sort of reverie, her eyes on the red hibiscus. Hibiscus. The syllables still retained their power to evoke for her visions of hot sensuous beauty and to send warm stirrings of the blood through her tired old body. Just as they had done when she was a gawky timid girl peopling her loneliness with beings from the pages of fiction. Somehow it had always been the flowers that kept lines as vivid before her eyes as the day she had first read them. She let her eyes close and saw one scene again. A shipwreck and surf pounding against a coral beach somewhere. Polynesia? Torres Strait? Sandalwood? It didn’t matter. “The tropic sun beat down, spreading a glitter as of diamonds over the beach. In the drowsy palm trees purple and green parrots chattered noisily. Terence Holderness dragged himself out of reach of the angry waves and lay upon the sand, his bronzed muscular chest rising and falling under a tattered shirt. He, a shipwrecked wanderer, while his unscrupulous brother, the baronet that he should have been, rode foxes at Cranston Castle! He opened his eyes and saw a native girl standing before him. A sarong encircled her graceful body and in her black hair was a hibiscus flower—”
She realized suddenly that the sound in her ears wasn’t the surf on a coral beach but a gently insistent rapping at her door.
After a momentary debate as to whether or not to answer it she decided that whoever it was undoubtedly had seen the light
under her door. Hastily closing the album she laid it and the remaining envelopes and the wax in the tray. She blew out the candle and went to the door.
It was Mr. Rennert. The uncertain light gave his face a stern appearance. Almost, she thought, formidable.
“Come in,” she said.
19
Plastic Wax
He stepped into the room and she closed the door behind him. She gestured toward a chair and as he sat down resumed her seat by the table. It gave her confidence in herself—this rigid posture in the hard straight chair, with books and papers ranged before her in curt business-like fashion. It was a safeguard of a sort against the vaguely disturbing effects of contact with masculinity which made her feel ill at ease.
She picked up a fountain pen and held it upright, like a proud masthead, as she said: “What can I do for you, Mr. Rennert?” It sounded, she knew, unbearably prim, so she added colorlessly: “Or is this just a social call?”
Suddenly she remembered their encounter under the frangipani tree, when he had surprised her in such a foolish attitude, with her face buried in that flower. It was another vision which the frangipani had brought to her with its smell—a scene from a novel by a lady writer whose works had been frowned upon by her parents. She wondered, angrily, if he had known that she had almost blushed and what he had thought of her as she chattered on inanely about the blood-tree of Yuquane to cover up her agitation.
His smile was pleasant but she had the feeling that his clear brown eyes were studying her closely.