Murder on the Tropic

by Todd Downing

  “Expect Lee to start another rampage?”

  “No, he’ll sleep the rest of the night, I think.”

  “I came up just as you hit him. He went out like a light, didn’t he? You must pack considerable of a wallop in that fist of yours.” Tolman handed him the knife.

  It wasn’t, Rennert knew, altogether the blow that had been responsible for Lee’s quick collapse, but he said nothing. They walked away together.

  “I wish they wouldn’t keep that damned Chinaman around here,” Tolman said. “That’s twice he has gone berserk.”

  “What happened before?”

  “He went after Miss Fahn, same as tonight. Falter got him in time.” Tolman hesitated. “I don’t think, though, that he would actually have hurt her. He didn’t have the knife. Just went to her room and yelled at her in Chinese. Ordinarily he’s a peaceable enough fellow.”

  “Any particular reason why he should dislike Miss Fahn?”

  “Well, you saw that scene in the dining room tonight.”

  “Yes, I surmised that it had been enacted before.”

  “Every day or so. I can’t say that I blame him much for getting sore, the way she’s always fussing at him. She goes in the kitchen and tries to tell him how to cook. She thinks that because he’s a Chinaman he smokes opium and is always threatening to fire him. He says that nobody can fire him but Falter and tells her to get out. She gets mad and,” he laughed drily, “there they go.”

  Rennert asked thoughtfully: “When did this other outburst take place?”

  “Just before he left, about two weeks ago.”

  “About the time the water began to disappear from the kitchen, then.”

  “What?” Tolman stopped under the archway between the patios.

  Rennert repeated his words.

  “Why, yes, I believe it was about that time.” Tolman seemed to be intent on contemplation of the sky.

  Rennert was thinking of the cigarettes which he had found in Lee’s room. I wonder, he was asking himself, if I am making a mistake in separating so completely the different strands in this case. If in the past they became twisted one may now lead off at a tangent which I have not suspected so far. A tangent, perhaps, that leads to murder.

  “Black as hell, isn’t it?” Tolman remarked. “A storm must be coming up. What about coming into the room for a chat?”

  Rennert brought his attention sharply back. “I’d be glad to,” he said.

  21

  A Flower in Silhouette

  As they walked through the darkness Tolman said in a voice curiously unlike his own: “You’re being very kind, Mr. Rennert.”

  “In what way?”

  “By paying me a visit. You don’t know how good it is to see a new face here, to have someone new to talk to. I get awfully lonesome sometimes.”

  Invariably, Rennert knew, men will bare their emotions more freely in the darkness or in their correspondence, when no vis-à-vis can scrutinize their countenances for signs of self-consciousness. But this was something deeper, a note that rang with intensity. An appeal to his sympathy? Scarcely that, the man had seemed to speak to himself. He wondered if it weren’t merely the familiar echo of self-commiseration carried to an extreme.

  He said: “I’ve been intending all evening to get better acquainted but haven’t had the opportunity so far.”

  “You have been busy, I know.”

  When they were in the room Tolman spoke with forced lightness: “Don’t stumble over the bearskin rugs or the cocktail trays or the butler. I’d recommend one of those chairs there the hard straight-backed one with the cracked rung or the rocker that creaks if you dare rock.”

  Rennert chose the rocker.

  The room was furnished more simply than his own, with what were obviously the left-overs from the other rooms. The mirror over the dresser had a crack whose presence was not dissembled by a strip of plaster. The rocker did creak as he found out when he shifted the weight of his body.

  He proffered cigarettes. Tolman, who had shed the dressing-gown, shook his head.

  “Thanks. I can’t use’em”

  Rennert lit one. He didn’t particularly want it but to have returned them to his pocket would have seemed too obvious a gesture of sympathy.

  He surveyed with interest the man who reclined before him in the unshielded glare of the lamp. Tolman was evidently in his late twenties, although there was something about his long face, a looseness of the skin, a look of weariness in the lacklustre blue eyes, that made him seem older. His hands lay flat upon the coverlet-white, delicate hands with blue veins traced across their surfaces. The fingers were long and tapering. He rubbed their tips gently upon the cloth as he said: “Ann just told me that Falter is worse. There doesn’t seem to be anything we can do, does there?”

  “We can only hope that a doctor gets here before it’s too late.”

  “Not much chance of that, is there?”

  “Not much.”

  The fingers were moving very slowly down the thin thighs.

  “What’s it all about, Rennert? Falter’s stroke at dinner tonight and Miguel’s death?”

  “I was going to ask you for your opinion, Tolman. I have been here less than twelve hours, remember.”

  Tolman said nothing for a full minute. He raised himself upon the pillows and stretching out his legs stared down at his bare toes.

  “Rennert,” he said, “do you mind if I am rather blunt?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Well, then, where do you come in on all this? I didn’t hear anything about your coming until breakfast this morning and then Falter just mentioned the fact that you were going to stay here at the hacienda for a while.”

  “I am here as agent for Solier. He sent me down on a business matter. That is all.”

  Tolman had turned his head and was looking directly at him. There was something disconcerting about the steadiness of his gaze.

  “You are interested in his company?” he asked.

  “Not at all. I merely know what Solier told me that a company was formed to build a hotel here, that the highway missed the place and that they were left with it on their hands.”

  Tolman’s eyes did not waver.

  “I was surprised,” he said, “at the idea of your being mixed up with a bunch like Solier and Falter. You’re sure you didn’t put any money in the deal?”

  “Not a red cent.”

  “Well, don’t.”

  “Want to tell me why you said that?”

  Tolman’s eyes strayed at last.

  “Because of what you did this afternoon,” he said flatly, “for Ann.” He cleared his throat. “I’d do anything in the world for the man who did that. The Solier-Falter-Stahl company is crooked, has been from the beginning. I’ve worked for them. I ought to know,” a shade of bitterness crept into the last words.

  “I understand that you drew the plans for the hotel.”

  “Yes, they still have me making changes in them. That’s what I get my room and board for.”

  Rennert leaned forward.

  “You say they still have you making changes?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I thought the whole project had been abandoned?”

  Tolman drew his knees up and clasped his hands about them.

  “That’s the queer part of it. I thought they had given up their idea when the road was changed. But just four days ago Falter had me make some further changes. It looks as if they were going ahead.”

  Rennert drew slowly upon his cigarette.

  “A hopeless location for a hotel,” he said to himself as much as to Tolman.

  “If it is a hotel.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Tolman raised one shoulder in a shrug.

  “I don’t know—and that’s straight. It’s just that the thought has struck me several times that the plans are the goofiest I ever saw for a hotel.”

  “In what way?”

  “I’ll show you.” He leaned over and opene
d a drawer in the bedside table. He took out a drawing-board upon which a blueprint had been affixed with thumb tacks. “See here,” he held it to the light.

  Rennert got up and leaned over.

  Tolman’s long forefinger was running over the surface.

  “You see,” he said, “the building is to have three stories. The first floor and the second are the regulation hotel style. On the first, a lobby, offices, dining room and kitchen; on the second, a mezzanine floor with six suites opening off it. But,” his finger came to a stop, “when we come to the top floor, what’s there? One large room with a glass skylight.” He looked up at Rennert. “If this is a hotel where are the guests to stay? Those half-dozen suites on the second floor wouldn’t accommodate nearly enough to make the place pay.”

  “This is the only building?”

  “Yes.”

  Rennert was staring thoughtfully at the section devoted to the upper floor.

  “They never gave you any indication as to the purpose of that top floor?”

  “None at all. They just said they didn’t want it partitioned off into rooms. They insisted, too, on the glass skylight.”

  “Just whom do you mean by ‘they’?”

  “Solier gave me the first instructions in San Antonio. In a rather general way. Then he and Falter and Stahl had a meeting here at the hacienda and called me in. They were more specific then and gave the orders about the top floor and the skylight.”

  “And the changes that you have been making recently?”

  “Falter has been instructing me about them. After conferences with Solier on the radio, I believe. They concern little details mostly.”

  “Don’t they consult Arnhardt?”

  Tolman hesitated.

  “I think they disregard him mostly. You see, at the beginning he had no interest in the company. It’s only since George Stahl’s death that he has been a member.” He seemed disposed to veer off this subject. “About that skylight and all. I’ve wondered sometimes if they mean it for a gigantic laboratory of some kind. Though why they should need the lay-out on the first two floors is beyond me.”

  Rennert felt his interest mounting. These plans and the fact that a power plant had been installed recently at the hacienda were component parts, he felt, of some element of the case that was gradually taking shape in his mind. So far he had failed to discern any motive behind these apparently purposeless crimes. But if there were more than an abandoned project for a hotel at stak.…

  “But you haven’t told me,” he said, “what interpretation you give to recent events here. I am referring, of course, to Miguel’s death and Falter’s illness.”

  Tolman said nothing. Rennert looked at him, trying to fathom the reason for his silence.

  He had shoved the board onto the table and was lying back upon the pillows, staring out the window. A curious change had come over his face. The alertness which had marked it was gone now and in its place was the complete lack of expression of a man whose body is alone in a room and whose mind is groping slowly down some private channel of its own.

  With a visible effort he brought his attention back. “Pardon me, Mr. Rennert, what was it you said?”

  Rennert repeated.

  “Oh.” Tolman’s eyes were directed toward him but he wasn’t looking at him, only staring in his direction with a blank fixity. His voice was as inanimate as his face. “Well, it can’t be any infectious disease, can it?”

  “I think that possibility can be discarded.”

  “Then that leaves only one thing. Poison.” Tolman let his eye-lids droop as if in weariness and a hectic flush spread over his cheekbones. Rennert had the strange, and uncomfortable, feeling that he had watched something die behind those blue eyes. Something essential that left behind it only emptiness. “It gives one a terrible feeling, doesn’t it, to think that some person with whom he is associated every day is a poisoner? I suppose you wonder why I’m not afraid—for Ann and myself. It’s because we’re harmless, don’t stand in anyone’s way.”

  “In anyone’s way? I don’t think I understand your meaning, Mr. Tolman.”

  “You see what’s behind these killings, don’t you?” Still that lifeless flow of words.

  “What?” Rennert felt that in his directness he was cutting through a confusing, vaguely defined welter of emotions, possibly brushing aside as veiling the main issue obscurities that might be meaningful.

  “Control of the hacienda. That’s the only reason for doing away with Stahl and Falter and Miguel. Someone wants complete and undisturbed possession. If some men want a thing bad enough they get it. Nothing can stop them. The survival of the fittest, you know.” Tolman stopped, his face working, and made a choking noise in his throat. “Sorry, Rennert,” he spoke through the folds of a handkerchief clamped over his mouth, “I’d better not talk any more tonight. This damned cough.”

  Yet when Rennert closed the door there had been no cough.

  He glanced across the patio.

  Ann Tolman and Mark Arnhardt stood sharply silhouetted in the doorway of Falter’s office. Her low laugh rippled across the flowers. Her hands were raised high, her bare arms slashing darkly across his white shirt front, as she fixed in his lapel a fire-red hibiscus.

  22

  A Shot in the Night

  A faint coolness had come into the air so that Rennert’s perspiration-damp clothing sent a faint chill through his body, but there was no diminution of the electric tensity with which the atmosphere was charged. The sky was impenetrably black, shrouding the stars.

  He went to his room and, without turning on the light, threw himself fully clothed upon the bed. He did not intend to sleep as yet and so left the door open for the sake of the draft between it and the window. There was a dull throbbing in his head and in his ears, no mistaking it now, the uncomfortable pressure upon the drums of which Miss Fahn had complained. In this wilderness on the margin of the tropics a building with a huge glass-domed roo.… a building that appeared a hotel but wasn’t.… a building offering enough potential gain to tempt an individual to triple murder..…

  The sharp crack of a pistol shot brought him to his feet.

  Lights cut crisscross swathes across the patio and two voices were calling. A man’s voice—Tolman’s—crying desperately: “Ann! Ann! Where are you?” A woman’s voice—his wife’s—sharp with terror: “Mark! Are you all right? Answer me!”

  As Rennert’s flashlight swept the beds of flowers Arnhardt’s roughened voice said: “Right here.” The light sought and found him.

  He was leaning against the bowl of the fountain, one hand clasping a handkerchief to his left shoulder. The handkerchief and the hand were dark with blood that glistened as it seeped between his fingers and trickled down his wrist.

  He raised his head and looked from Tolman’s face to Ann’s, both white masks against the night, and at Rennert.

  “Someone shot me,” he spoke through set teeth. “It’s not serious—”

  “Help me,” Rennert said to Tolman. “We’ll take him to his room.”

  “I can walk.” Arnhardt was quick in protest.

  He stalked across the patio, Rennert following him. Tolman stood in evident indecision, then turned in the direction of his own room. Ann had vanished.

  Arnhardt’s door was open. As they went toward it a figure stepped out of the shelter of the eaves into the path of the torch. It was Flores. He was tying about his waist the cord of a vivid red and black dressing-gown. His eyes centered on Arnhardt and his fingers were suddenly still.

  “What has happened?” he asked, a sibilance creeping into his English for the first time.

  “Mr. Arnhardt has been hurt,” Rennert said briefly.

  “The shot awoke me. It took me several moment to realize what it was. Is he seriously injured?”

  “I think not.”

  Rennert preceded Arnhardt into the latter’s room and turned on the light. As he closed the door the Mexican was standing a few feet away, staring inside wit
h eyes that were as fixed and unmoving as two chips of obsidian. He was running the tip of his tongue quickly and nervously over his upper lip.

  Rennert turned into the room and watched Arnhardt sink into a chair, take away the handkerchief, and wring it between the fingers of his right hand. Blood squirted to the floor.

  Still in silence he leaned over Arnhardt, removed his coat and, unloosening his tie, stripped away the shirt from his left shoulder.

  Ann came into the room with a bowl of water and cloths.

  Arnhardt stared at her, his face rigid.

  “Ann,” he said with a trace of brusqueness as his eyes rested on the stained tiles, “go on back. This is no place for you.”

  She said nothing, did not even look at him, but drew another chair forward and set the bowl upon it. She handed Rennert one of the cloths and stood still and firm-faced as he bathed the wound. The bullet, he soon saw, had plowed through the flesh of the chest just below the armpit. It was bleeding profusely and looked serious but probably was not.

  In a few minutes he stood back and surveyed the impromptu bandage which he had fixed.

  “I think,” he said, “that will suffice for the time being.”

  “Thanks.”

  There was silence for a moment while Arnhardt stared stonily at the floor, his hands clasped about the caps of his knees.

  “Excuse me now.” Ann Tolman spoke for the first time. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” she looked at neither of them but gave the impression somehow that she was addressing Rennert rather than Arnhardt.

  “Very well, Mrs. Tolman.”

  When she had gone and the door was closed Rennert propped a foot on the chair beside the other.

  “Now then?” he said. “What about it?”

  Arnhardt said nothing for a moment but maintained his un-budging pose. When he raised his eyes to Rennert’s at last they were cold and bright with anger.

  “What about it? Just this,” with a downward motion of his jaw toward his wounded shoulder. “I was coming through the patio, headed for this room, when somebody used me for a little target practice. The shot came from somewhere straight ahead of me. In front of the door, I think.”