The Kissed Corpse

by Brett Halliday

  He didn’t act surprised to learn that I had been holding out on him, but, then, he never does, so you can’t tell. He pulled up to the Martin cabin in second gear, and as I got out, he said gruffly:

  “I’ll be at your place when you get there.”

  I opened the back door of my not-so-late model car and let the pups in, then got in and pulled away from the spot with a jumpy feeling of relief.

  But I knew it wasn’t ended. Knew it just as certainly as though I’d seen the handwriting on the wall. I was mixed up in murder, and a man doesn’t leave that behind him simply by driving away.

  *“Mum’s the Word for Murder,” published December 1938.

  4

  Burke was just getting out of his car at my front gate when I pulled into the drive. He walked on in, knowing my front door is always unlocked, while I got out my typewriter and bag.

  He was standing in the middle of the living room floor ruffling his stubby gray hair with heavy fingers when I came in. He looked depressed and worried.

  Going past him to a bedroom with my bag, I said: “Open a bottle and pour us both a triple shot.”

  He was sitting at the center table in front of a bottle of bourbon and two brimming wine glasses when I came back into the room. He lifted his glass and said heavily: “I don’t like any of this, Asa.”

  I knew what he meant. I sat down and swallowed a couple of fingers of the whiskey and said: “You’re going to like it less when I finish spilling all I know.”

  He nodded, taking out a stubby pipe and filling it with the rank tobacco he uses. “I gathered you were holding out on Jelcoe,” he said mildly. “You shouldn’t do that, Asa.”

  “Why not? God knows he always holds out on you when he gets a chance.”

  Burke’s heavy seamed face was placidly inexpressive. He sucked flame into the bowl of his pipe and said: “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

  That’s Jerry Burke all over. He’s so damned fair he leans over backward. With Chief Jelcoe not missing a chance to knife him in the back he still insists on giving him every break.

  “That’s up to you,” I told him stiffly. “You can hand Jelcoe my information if you want, but you’ll be a stubborn fool if you don’t take advantage of it this time.”

  He puffed on his pipe without saying anything, letting his bigboned body relax comfortably while he waited for me to go on.

  I emptied my glass and began where I had first noticed the flashes of light from the Dwight estate, going on to tell about calling Leslie Young and asking him to bring his field glasses over; then describing in vivid detail what I had seen through the glasses.

  Jerry Burke was sitting erect when I paused after telling how Leslie Young rode away from the Martin cabin hell-for-leather after seeing the millionaire spying on his wife.

  “You shouldn’t have let him go like that,” he said gravely. “You could have phoned me.…”

  I squirmed under his boring gaze, and poured myself another drink. “I know I should have done something,” I admitted unhappily. “But I’ll be damned if I know yet what it would have been. You know Young. You know how much good it would have done to argue with him.”

  Burke nodded, rubbing his square chin. “It’s difficult to reason with Young,” he admitted. “I’m not blaming you, Asa. Go on.”

  I related how I had packed my things to leave the cabin, and then suddenly decided to take a walk up the canyon. He listened without a flicker of expression on his face until I described the man I met just before coming on Young’s dead body.

  “Good God!” he exclaimed. “That sounds like …”

  “It was,” I interrupted him. “Rufus Hardiman. The Washington diplomat who is visiting Dwight.”

  “That’s bad.” Jerry was staring past me, shaking his head. “Leslie hated Dwight’s guts and suspected that Hardiman was conniving with him to force some sort of a settlement from Mexico in connection with Dwight’s oil claims. Leslie was a fanatical champion of Mexico’s expropriation program. He wouldn’t have stopped at anything to break up a deal of that sort.”

  “How about the letter Young had in his pocket?” I asked excitedly. “How do you suppose that hooks up?”

  Jerry shook his head doubtfully and brought the folded sheet of paper from his pocket. Spreading it out on the table, he read it aloud while I stared at the fateful symbol that had reappeared on Leslie Young’s cheek in death.

  “It doesn’t make much sense,” he commented as he finished reading the note, “but we mustn’t forget the telephoned warning for Leslie to stay away from the hacienda tonight.”

  “That name!” I interjected, repeating the mouthful of syllables, “‘Michaela O’Toole.’ What sort of a phony would you call that?”

  “I’m not at all positive it’s a phony,” Jerry said soberly. “The Mexicans have a way of adding an a to a masculine name to make it feminine.”

  “A feminine Michael O’Toole? She sounds interesting.”

  Jerry nodded, taking his cold pipe from his mouth and jabbing the stem of it at the double-barred symbol on the letter:

  “I’ve seen that two-barred cross before. Leslie Young had one about two inches high, hammered out of pure silver by a native artisan. He showed it to me one night in a box full of souvenirs he had brought back from Mexico. And that same evening, Asa,” Burke went on impressively, “he spun me a yarn about a certain Mike O’Toole he’d known in Tejuantepec years ago.”

  “In connection with the cross?”

  “I’m not certain. I have a vague hunch that seeing the cross reminded him of O’Toole in some way … though he didn’t say so. O’Toole was a renegade Irish sergeant, a deserter from the Fifth Cavalry while on patrol duty down in the Big Bend. He’d gone native, as I recall Leslie’s story, though I don’t remember any mention of a daughter.”

  “But that sort of explains the wording of the note,” I pointed out. “Michaela O’Toole says Young doesn’t know her, but that she knows much about him. An old friend of her father’s would fill the bill.”

  Jerry Burke frowned and knocked out his pipe, refilled it thoughtfully. “We’ve got too damned many leads,” he grunted. “With some sex stuff on the side. I wish I knew more about the Laura Yates Mrs. Young mentioned.”

  “And Mrs. Young said it was a woman’s voice over the telephone this noon warning her husband to stay away from Mexico.”

  Jerry glanced at his empty glass and I refilled it. He read the note again and muttered: “It says that no one at the hacienda knows Leslie Young.…”

  As his voice trailed off, I took up the thought: “It would be a fair guess to presume that the person who warned him to stay away will be there. If she carried out her threat … it would be disconcerting for Leslie Young to appear in the flesh.”

  He nodded stolidly. “A clever man might learn something of importance at the Hacienda del Torro tonight by keeping his eyes open and his mouth shut. A man who might conceivably pass for Leslie Young.”

  I said: “That’s one of the things I do best, Jerry.”

  He nodded. “I wondered if you’d volunteer. I’d try it myself but I’m too well-known along the Border … and I haven’t quite the right physique. Still, I shouldn’t ask you …”

  “You can’t give me the run-around,” I argued. “I’m already in this thing up to my neck. I’ll take that note for identification and pass myself off for Leslie Young until I meet someone who knows Leslie Young hasn’t any business being up and about tonight. Then we’ll have our murderer, Jerry.”

  “It sounds simple but it’s likely to be dangerous.”

  I didn’t try to laugh that off. I’m not the type to plunge into danger for the fun of it. But the idea of going across the border and posing as a dead man intrigued me. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. I told Burke so.

  He nodded glumly and got up. “I’ll be somewhere around to keep an eye on you, but don’t bank on me too much. Mexico is foreign territory and I don’t pull a lot of weight over there.
God knows what you’ll run into at the hacienda.”

  “But I can’t,” I told him as lightly as I could manage it, “pass up a chance to meet a damsel named Michaela O’Toole.”

  “I suppose not,” he grunted, “but you’ve got to remember you’re a family man,” with a glance toward the Scotties lying quietly in their corner.

  “I’ve got you down in my will to inherit Nip and Tuck,” I told him. “So that’s all right.”

  They came trotting forward when I spoke their names. Burke and I went to the door together and down the walk to his car, with the Scotties staying sedately at heel. Somehow, they seem to know when grave matters are afoot.

  At his car, Jerry shook hands with me soberly. “Watch your step tonight, Asa. Pretend not to recognize me if you see me across the line. I don’t know how close I can get to the hacienda nor what I can do if you hit a snag, but I’ll be somewhere close.”

  I told him that would be swell, and watched him drive away. Then I whistled to the pups and took them across to the park for a run.

  5

  A murky bank of low hanging clouds was moving in over Mt. Franklin when I got back to the house. There was a flurry of cooling rain, then one of those drenching downpours that come in from the desert and sweep on down the valley.

  The heavy clouds and a drizzle stayed on after the rain passed over the city. I killed time by opening a can of corned beef hash, heating it in the oven with strips of bacon across the top, poaching an egg to complete a one-man meal.

  By seven o’clock I’d killed all the time I could. I was nervous and edgy. I wanted to get on with the evening’s work. I wanted, by God, to meet Michaela O’Toole.

  The name held a peculiar fascination for me. With a slug of brandy in a cup of black coffee, I spread the sheet of orange notepaper out and read it two or three times, spending a lot of time studying that inked cross with its two bars. What the hell did it mean? What did the message mean? What was the connection between it and death in the afternoon?

  It was seven thirty when I drained my coffee cup and refolded the note. I wondered what the correct attire would be for an evening appointment with a femme named Michaela O’Toole at a Mexican hacienda. It didn’t sound like an occasion for tails … which was lucky, for I didn’t have any.

  The clouds had closed down and a wind had blown up, whipping flurries of rain gustily before it, so I changed to an old dark suit, with a soft shirt and four-in-hand. With a slicker over that, and a felt hat that had been rained on in the past, I was ready for a wet night.

  I took the note with me, but no gun. I had a .38 in the house but this was one night I didn’t want it. The Mexican officials sometimes take a notion to search cars crossing the border, and I’m not exactly gun-handy anyway. I’ve done all my lead-slinging via the typewriter.

  With a goodnight for Nip and Tuck and with my heart hitting a little faster pace than usual, I backed my ’36 model sedan out of the garage, drove through the city and hit the Ysleta highway eastward through the Valley.

  It was dark enough to call for headlights by the time I’d driven the thirteen miles to Ysleta. It was still trying to rain.

  I turned south on the Zaragoza road, slowed at the bridge and was waved on by a slickered U. S. Customs’ man, pulled on to the other side where a Mexican official glanced in the back of my car and said, “Bueno, Senor,” politely.

  Just across the bridge the Waterfill Gardens Cafe and picnic grounds were brightly lighted but didn’t have many customers.

  I passed the Gardens and turned left on the first road as instructed by the note, and the rain was beginning to come down again.

  All at once I realized what I was actually letting myself in for. Just crossing the Rio Grande from north to south somehow makes an unaccountable difference. It’s purely a mental reaction, of course. Actually, there are the same carefully tended farms, the same adobe houses on the Mexican side as on the American. Along the border the percentage of Mexicans to Americans is approximately the same on either side.

  But there’s a feeling of helplessness that grips you once you leave American soil behind. After all is said and done, American citizens don’t realize what law-and-order actually means until they’re in a foreign country where it’s only an empty phrase.

  You can laugh it off, and I can laugh it off, now, but it wasn’t something I could laugh off that rainy night while headed for I-didn’t-know-what at the ranch of the bull south of the Rio Grande. People do disappear in Mexico without leaving a trace behind them. Such thoughts were my companions as I drove along slowly, and my damned imagination had me jumpy.

  The road was deserted and my headlights cut a narrow swath of light through rain that slanted down. I kept a sharp lookout for Burke as I drove along, thinking he might be where he could give me the high-sign, but I didn’t see him.

  With Zaragoza about a quarter of a mile behind me, the road curved sharply to the left across an irrigation ditch lined with cottonwoods.

  As I made the turn, my headlights picked up and outlined the figure of a woman stepping from beneath the shelter of a tree toward the road. She was facing me and her outstretched arm signalled me to stop.

  There was a white face beneath the soggy brim of a hat which might have once been jaunty. I stepped on the brake because she was an American and had no business being out alone on a deserted stretch of Mexican road on a wet night.

  She had the right-hand door open and was sliding in beside me before my car had stopped rolling. She said, “You’re late,” with chattering teeth, before she’d had a chance to see my face.

  I turned my head sideways and the dashlight threw a faint glow over both our faces. Her teeth stopped chattering when she got a good look at me. She said:

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were … someone else.”

  She was good-looking, in a hard, self-possessed sort of way. Perhaps I shouldn’t say hard. I’m trying to set down my initial impression without allowing it to be colored by later events. “Self-possessed” tells the whole story. She’s the only woman I’ve ever known who could be wholly self-possessed under just those circumstances.

  Her voice was cool and impersonal. She was about thirty, with widely spaced gray eyes which regarded me steadily, a wide mouth that was heavily rouged, and a firm chin. She wore a tailored linen suit which clung, rain-soaked, to an athletically firm body with its full share of curves. She seemed more curious than embarrassed as she studied my face.

  I found myself apologizing: “I’m sorry too. I didn’t know you were waiting for someone, and I naturally thought …”

  She said: “It does sound screwy, but I made the appointment before I knew it was going to rain.”

  There was mockery in her eyes. I knew she was from the east. A New Yorker, I guessed. I couldn’t help stiffening up defensively. New Yorkers (particularly the female of the species) always put me on the defensive. I’m just a boy from the cow country, and they seem to sense it intuitively. I asked:

  “Do you want to sit here out of the rain and wait for whomever you are expecting?”

  She repeated, “Whomever?” with upcurved lips, as though it amused her to hear me use the correct word under the unusual circumstances.

  I hate patronizing females from the east. I said: “It was merely a helpful suggestion. As a matter of fact, I’m late for an appointment as it is.”

  “So am I.” The curve of amusement went away from her lips and she looked worried. “Are you going far in this direction?”

  “About ten miles.”

  “As far as … the Hacienda del Torro?”

  I should have been surprised but I wasn’t. It was all in line with the night … with the adventure I was embarked upon. Things like that do happen once a man pushes out into the unknown. I only said:

  “That happens to be my destination.”

  Her eyes widened and she bit her lower lip. She was prettier than I had first thought.

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Things do ha
ppen, don’t they. Would you be willing to pinch-hit for my negligent escort?”

  I said: “I wouldn’t leave a she-duck stranded out on a night like this,” and stepped on the starter.

  She put her hand on my arm as I reached for the gear-shift lever. There was pulsing warmth in her hand, and her voice was oddly changed to a lower, more intimate tone:

  “It isn’t as simple as it sounds. I was to have been vouched for by … whomever it was I was expecting. I won’t be able to get in without someone to vouch for me. Unless you’re willing to do that, I might as well stay right here.”

  There it was already. Ten miles from the hacienda, and I had bumped into something funny. I couldn’t afford to pass up anything. I said:

  “Why not? You’ll be in the car with me. There’s no reason I should tell anyone I picked you up on the road.”

  Her fingers closed tightly on my arm. “Hadn’t you better get started?”

  I put the car in gear and eased out the clutch. I glanced at her as we pulled away from the cotton-woods, and said: “It’s going to look funny, though. You soaked to the skin and me perfectly dry. What’ll I tell them at the hacienda? That you got out in the rain to change a tire while I sat in the car with my slicker on?”

  She laughed and lifted a small leather overnight bag which I hadn’t noticed before. “I brought along a change when I saw it might be wet waiting. If you’ll take the ten miles slowly, I’ll slide into the back seat and make a quick change to dry things.”

  I told her to go ahead, and she climbed over into the back.

  “The dome-light switch is by the door,” I told her, “if you feel the need of light.”

  She thanked me matter-of-factly and switched it on. I drove slowly into the rain. I’m not going to say I made any great effort to keep my eyes off the rear-view mirror which reflected her in the dim glow of the dome-light as she undressed. What the hell? She must have known it was there, and she wasn’t making any effort to keep herself from being seen.