by Joan Sanger
“And what made you so sure?”
A deep flush overspread Miguel’s face for a moment. “A little thing I no like to talk of. But you see, Señor Wyndham have promised to give me whole dollar that night because I call downstairs so much for ice for his drinks. Well, Señor Wyndham never give me that dollar. And he not like these people who say, ‘Miguel I give you this and that tomorrow’ and then forget all about it! If Señor Wyndham had been live that night, he would have given Miguel the dollar.”
“Oh, is that all?” I put in thoroughly disappointed. “Something might have turned up ... so urgent, so important that the dollar was necessarily forgotten.”
But Miguel was unswerving in his loyalty. “Señor Wyndham not that way. Something bad happened here that night. Miguel sure.”
Alcott bore down on Miguel again, watching him closely with his hawk-like blue eyes. “Was there anything else unusual you noticed in the corridor to make you so sure of that?”
Miguel screwed up his forehead in thought. He was like a child in his earnest desire to help.
“Nothing, I think of now. People come and go same as always. Work keep me busy. I no chance to stand and watch.” He said the last with disdain.
“Then we’ll skip to the next morning. In cleaning up was anything unusual you noticed about Mr. Wyndham’s suite? Disorder, bloodstains, anything suspicious?”
Miguel shook his head. “I no do morning cleaning and that day boy! Bah! He never see nothing.”
“So that’s that!”
With an air of finality I moved toward the storeroom door, feeling as though I couldn’t stand the stifling heat another moment. But apparently Alcott hadn’t yet had enough.
“Er—one question more! When the lights came later that night, did you see la Señorita Caros again?”
Miguel shook his head solemnly. “No! When lights come on la Señorita was no where about. Later that night boy from roof tell us La Caros is seeck. She send word up she can dance no more that night. At that time I say to myself, ‘No wonder that girl seeck. She smoke too many cigarettes.’ Now I no say that no more.”
“Is Lolita Caros dancing at the Sevilla Biltmore this year?”
Miguel shook his head.
“Do you know where she is?”
Miguel’s voice was barely audible when he answered. “I hear she dance at the Chateau Madrid.”
Alcott looked hard at Miguel for a moment. “By the way, Miguel, you didn’t happen to be a little bit in love with the beautiful dancer yourself?”
Miguel flushed scarlet. “Oh, no! No! I good family man.” He turned toward the door.
Suddenly, Alcott reached over and clenched Miguel’s wrist in a vice-like grip.
“Then what are you afraid of, man?”
For a moment, Miguel looked at Alcott in stark terror. Then somehow, his childlike faith reasserted itself. He reached into his pocket and took there-from a soiled envelope that was post-marked from the States. With trembling hands, he removed a slip that contained a single typewritten sentence in Spanish. Haltingly, in a dull voice Miguel translated it for us. “It mean only this—‘If you had eyes on the night of February 13th last, you better have not the tongue now. Look out.’”
Chapter XIII “STRANGE INTERLUDE”
IN a gay lantern lit garden known as the Chateau Madrid the head waiter seated us at a small table near the dance floor. There, between a French menu and an English speaking attendant we conveyed our urgent need for a couple of daiquiris and a late supper. We knew the evening was going to make a bad dent in the exchequer. We knew, too, it was unavoidable.
The Havana Weekly Bulletin had stated, with superlatives of enthusiasm that Señorita Lolita Caros was dancing once nightly at the Chateau Madrid. With that much in our favor, it only remained for us to cultivate the art of patience. And somehow, lounging there beneath the tall shadowy palms and the deep green glow of the tropical sky, waiting seemed no great ordeal.
Around us soft waves of Spanish chatter rose and fell. On a diminutive stage almost hidden by boganvillia, a group of Hawaiians plaintively strummed their far away love songs. Alternate lights of rose, violet and green lent the swaying couples on the dance floor a strange remote quality, like the phantasmagoria of a dream. The warm magic of the tropical night was all about us. I lit a cigarette, reflecting idly on the incongruity between so pleasant a scene and the dark reason for our presence.
Then just behind me I heard a girl laugh gayly.
“If it isn’t Johnny Ellis in the flesh!” I looked around into the sunburnt face and smiling eyes of a sturdy young woman and in an instant I was on my feet.
“Why, Lynn!”
I beamed as though never in all my life had I been quite so glad to see anyone. Actually I don’t believe I ever was. Yet to be entirely candid, there was about Lynn Dawson little that should have kept an old acquaintance still viewing her as exactly the ideal God-send for a moon-drenched Cuban garden. For all, the warmth of her manner and her lovely blow away hair, I knew as no one else that Lynn had a disconcerting way of running off at odd moments toward Careers and Life Purposes and all that. Just the same, back somewhere in my post college days I’d been acutely in love with her and of such strong affection there’s generally a long afterglow.
To our everlasting credit, no mention was made of how small the world was nor how little we’d changed. But all through the business of introducing Alcott I couldn’t help wondering what stroke of good fortune had brought Lynn* down here. Then Lynn settled the question for me once for all.
“No, Johnny, I haven’t repented and I haven’t settled down.” She gave a gay laugh. “And, sh! If you won’t tell anyone, I haven’t set the world on fire either.”
“That makes us about even,” I grinned, ridiculously pleased that no new and unexpected barriers had reared themselves between us in the past seven years.
“But it really doesn’t,” she said, ruefully. “You aren’t taking your first vacation in years with a couple of relatives on your neck.” She made a wry face off toward a nearby table where her party were just being seated. “For the Lord’s sake, and incidentally mine, come over and rescue me sometime soon! Anyhow, I’m desperately out of date about you, Johnny.” She held out her hand and smiled.
“I dare you to join us now.”
Lynn shook her head. “Can’t tonight. But just try me another time. I’ll be gratefully yours forever!”
She scribbled her phone number down. “Don’t forget!” she smiled.
“Small chance.”
I watched her move off to a table not far behind Alcott where a plump grey-haired lady beamed maternally and two men, in dinner jackets, promptly rose at her approach. Lynn doubtless said something in explanation of her stop, for one of the party, a man of about forty-five (and quite unnecessarily good-looking, too) turned his scrutiny in our direction. I thought his face looked vaguely familiar but for the life of me I couldn’t place him.
Not that I wasted much time on the matter just then. Alcott was looking at me quizzically.
“Love’s young dream, eh?”
I nodded casually, not even remarking how closely he’d hit to the truth. After all, I was growing used to Alcott and I knew for all his grey hairs and sober mien, he wasn’t so much up on me in years.
“Seven long years ago,” I confessed with would-be cynicism. “If I could have had my say, I’d been married to that girl and by now, perhaps had—er—a nice little electrolux and cocktail shaker. Today I wouldn’t be tied down to any dame living. Not if she looked like Greta Garbo, had the brains of Frances Perkins and the income of our dear almost forgotten Hetty Green. Good God, no!”
Nevertheless, with that sticky sweet Hawaiian music in my ears, I found myself looking off through the tops of the palm trees, acutely reminiscent of the time when I hadn’t been so serenely headed for a bachelor’s path.
From the limbo of those days up rose the ghost of a certain infernal game that was Lynn’s pet invention. We both kn
ew its rules backward and forward. On that particular point Lynn had been insistent. She was such a straight shooting little devil, she wasn’t taking the slightest chance of misunderstanding. The game consisted in pretending for whole evenings at a stretch that she wasn’t at all bent on the career which we both knew perfectly well she intended to have at all costs; in pretending that my weekly pay, then, the munificent sum of twenty-three dollars per was entirely adequate to keep us forever in comfort and ease; in pretending that, instead of being cynically disillusioned about marriage (as the poor kid actually was, because of the smash-up of her own parent’s venture) there was a chance that some day, some time, somehow ... It was a thoroughly demoralizing game, I can tell you. I remembered how, after whole evenings of it, I used to see her off for college on the midnight train and then for weeks ensuing I’d be sunk six fathoms deep in gloom. At those times I’d cuss myself for ever having turned my back on the decent solid chance in my uncle’s business. I’d rail at high editors and the phoney lure of the printers’ ink. I’d gnash my teeth at the grubby soul corroding limitations of my job. But now looking back ruefully, I had to admit my really great tactical blunder had been in helping Lynn to her first job.
Alcott cut in. “People talk a lot of damned rot about ‘youth, dear old youth,’ don’t they?”
“At that, it’s better than hardening of the arteries and gout,” I laughed. “Anyhow, no man should marry his first girl. We’ve got to keep some illusions in life.”
Alcott narrowed his eyes down till only the crows-feet in the corners suggested they were twinkling.
“That’s why Lolita Caros has been on the floor three minutes and you haven’t turned to look at her yet.”
Incredulous, I spun around. There was no gain-saying the facts. The Hawaiian music had ceased. In its place the regular orchestra had struck up a sharply accented tango. Spotlights flooded the center of the floor, where with castanets clicking and the inevitable shawl draped closely about her, a Cuban girl still in her early twenties was threading her way with sinuous grace through the intricate pattern of a Spanish dance.
Nonplussed I shook my head. “Say, I’d better pack my grip and report back to old Gerraghty. Fat lot of help I’m turning out to be!” I lapsed a moment. “Great guns ... but she’s a knockout!”
The exclamation was wrung from me unexpectedly as La Caros, arms akimbo, heels tapping, hips swaying ever so slightly, glided a few feet from our table. About the girl there hovered an indefinable quality of charm and freshness which somehow took me by complete surprise. Nothing tangible! Neither the utterly rakish angle at which she wore her Spanish sailor, nor the dazzling regularity of her white teeth set off by her olive skin, nor the flash of her dark shadowed eyes. And yet there wasn’t a person in the garden who didn’t seem to catch it as I did and strain a bit forward, eyes intent upon her. As for La Caros, it was obvious that she warmed herself in the glow of the admiration she kindled, basking in it, smiling now into this face, now into that, taking her public’s enthusiasm as her natural due.
She was youth exuberant, vitality abundant, joi de vivre! Through all the intricacy of the dance, my eyes and thoughts followed her, while I speculated —oh, all the usual speculation of .any man upon a lovely woman! And all the while there rose with mocking persistence, the spectre of a pink packet of letters locked in a lawyer’s strong box, a thousand miles away. “Dearest Steve.... I count the days these two, three weeks. Then maybe I am in your arms again, and again I know what real kisses once more can mean.”
Suddenly the music reached a sharp finale and was still. Lolita Caros bowed her acknowledgment to the enthusiastic applause of her audience, drew her brilliant shawl more tightly about her waist and was gone.
“Well, what do you think?” Pete was watching me narrowly.
“Simply that Dunlap was cockeyed when he tried to laugh that girl off as a possible cause for jealousy. It strikes me La Caros would be cause enough for a tidal wave, an earthquake or a good old-fashioned revolution. Whew!”
“Women are all a matter of viewpoint!” Alcott took a few philosophic drags on his cigarette in silence and looked off. “Anyhow, I don’t think it was Lolita that Dunlap was trying to disparage, as much as the Green Eyed Boy himself.”
“Maybe.”
We didn’t pursue the subject. The orchestra had struck up a familiar favorite, “Mon Homme.” Once more the spotlights shone and La Caros was on the floor, this time accompanied by a dark-eyed youth, done up in a sweater and red neckerchief. I noticed that Lolita too had changed her costume for the scant skirt and tattered check blouse of an Apache girl. Her smooth brown legs were bare, only her high red heeled slippers and her eyes looked impudent and unafraid.
“There never was a man just like my man....” The dark youth caught her roughly by the neck and swung her into his arms. Clasped tightly, almost annealed into one body, they went through all the usual forms of that much overworked dance of the Parisian gutter.
It was old stuff, of course. But in a new way. Never had I seen the Apache danced more superbly than there in that Cuban garden, with the very moon slipping up over the tops of the palm trees as though to look on. Once, when with especially vicious force her young partner hurled her from him, Lolita swayed, gasped and with a litheness that seemed the very apotheosis of grace, she came back again for more. Some few of the audience, enthusiastic, broke out into applause. Lolita’s face was flushed with excitement. Languorously she looked at her supposed lover, even more languorously at those enthusiasts who shouted “Bravos” in the midst of the performance. Swifter and louder grew the music, madder and wilder grew the dance.
Once the suspicion crossed my mind that her Spanish partner was resenting a trifle too realistically the gracious glances she scattered so profusely about her audience. He said something close to her ear; then with a sudden excess of brutality he flung the girl from him. Four feet away, just by our table, she crumbled to the floor. The spotlight leaped our way. It was a purple moment to be sure.
There at our feet lay La Caros, so still that for a fatuous instant I wondered if she were stunned. Then suddenly she opened her large dark eyes, smiled straight at me, then at Alcott, and having done so, a flicker of a frown passed over her face. I was certain she was hurt, but as though divining my thought she shook her head, looked intently at us both again and a moment later glided back into her partner’s arms and out on the floor to their grand finish.
During La Caros’ third and last dance, some sort of colorful Mexican solo, I was conscious of her looking over toward our table once or twice. Lynn must have noticed it, too, for she scribbled a message on the back of her menu and sent it across our way.
Johnny, I’m making my bookings promptly, lest you slip away forever. Day after tomorrow at eleven we go swimming. La Playa Beach. By the big clock. Lynn.
Lynn darling, we swim at once if you say the word.
Unfortunately my signature was obscured by a long list of Cuban delicacies but it made no difference. I watched my waiter hand the message to her and laughed at her warning nod off toward Lolita Caros.
Thinking it was some more of Lynn’s nonsense, I glanced her way when a short while later the head waiter touched Alcott lightly on the shoulder. But this time, I missed my guess.
“Pardon, señor. I was asked to deliver this to you by Señorita Caros.”
Alcott’s face was unexpressive as he took the envelope that was handed him, but he tore it open without delay. As the headwaiter lingered, Alcott addressed him quietly. “There will be no answer. I noticed La Señorita leave the garden a few minutes ago.”
Then suddenly, as though from the clear air, Lolita’s dancing partner was at our side.
“Señores,” he began, looking from Alcott to me uncertainly. “I know not what La Caros has written you, but I give you warning. Pay no heed to that most lovely lady. She is—how you say—mos’ impulsive in her fancies and her husband, he no like it. What is more he find strange means of showing his
displeasure. He have me here nightly in the garden to watch her. The Señores had best be warned.”
Saying which, the young fellow turned on his heel and disappeared.
Alcott raised his eyebrows in mild amusement and without a word, he handed me the note sprawled in the round, unformed writing that we knew so well.
Tomorrow night I am having a Charity Fete at my hacienda. If the two American gentlemen would care to come, I enclose tickets. I trust to see you. La Caros.
“Pete, you big stiff! To think I never once suspected your fatal fascination!”
Alcott brushed his hand across his weathered, scarred face and his jaw set grimly. “Don’t be a sap-head. Instead, you’d better chase up the motive. And there is one. You can bet your shirt on that!”
“Maybe. But here’s where the case stops being a tough assignment and begins to look like a Charity hand-out to me.”
“Going to the party?”
“Sure thing!”
“Well, count me out.”
“And why the devil—?”
“Because it happens I’ve got a few lines out on this mess and a crazy hunch I’ll work best if I give all the principals a wide berth till I’m sure of my ground.”
“Have it your own way, but one thing sure, this little old bloodhound’s hitting it off to the Charity Fete.”
I was in high spirits. A couple of hours later, worn out, though still exuberant, I fell asleep in our stuffy down-town room and dreamed that the Cuban God was a very fine fellow indeed, with a Hawaiian banjo and a trayful of choice Havana daiquiris. Furthermore, he confided to me that his real name was Luck.
And so I snapped my fingers recklessly at warnings and the old Wyndham curse.
Footnote
* Dear Lynn. Whenever, .. Wherever, .. If ever you read this, forgive my dragging you into this tale at all. For your sake I might have abstained and I know it. Yet so definite though unconscious was the influence you exerted on my sojourn in Havana, I doubt if the story of that adventure could be honestly set down without you. But then, you feel as I do about this, I know.