by Joan Sanger
“Your frien’—Meestair Alcott—where is he?”
I explained that a matter of importance had taken him out, but that he was expected back shortly.
“Oh!” For a moment La Caros looked uncertain as to whether she ought to proceed. Then she made a helpless gesture.
“It makes no real difference, I suppose. Either one of you gentlemen will tell me what I want . . . what I must know!”
It seemed a big order, so I kept my own counsel. She noticed my reserve and looked up at me, her eyes dark depths of entreaty.
“Please. Do not treat me so. It is more unkind than you know!”
The girl’s sincerity seemed obvious. Her face was pallid with grey shadows, her hands opened and closed nervously.
“I am sorry anything has occurred to cause you distress. You must be more explicit!”
“That is why I come here. What did you mean when you say last night that Stephen Wyndham have disappear?”
In the face of the fact that the press had been shrieking with the story for weeks, La Caros’ question was absurd. I told her so.
But she shook her head with curious insistence. “You do not understand. I am kept very busy between the hacienda and my dancing. Since I marry,” she hesitated then proceeded uneasily, “I depend on my husband for the news.”
“And he omitted mention of this?”
She nodded.
“I see.”
Then I outlined the newspaper facts as succinctly as possible, while she sat forward regarding me with a curious, puzzled look on her face. At the conclusion, she rose to her feet and stretched out her hand.
“Thank you. That explains much. I will say ‘adios.’”
I moved between her and the door.
“Not quite yet, Señorita. Frankness is sometimes repaid in kind, you know.” She glanced at me in sharp surprise. “Before you go, I’m sure you want to explain just how it happened you were listening at the door of Mr. Wyndham’s room on the night of February 13th, last?”
The color rose in Lolita’s face.
“Who have told you this?”
“That’s unimportant. Er—I hate to bring the matter up, but it happens—er, you see—” I was getting embarrassed. “Oh, deuce take it! Señorita, you’re involved in this Wyndham tangle a good bit more than you know!”
Lolita Caros looked at me a moment, then she shrugged. “Santa Maria, I don’t understand any of this. But surely—I’ll do whatever I can.” Her voice fell low. “For him.”
I tried to believe that she spoke sincerely but mine is a skeptical nature.
“You might begin by answering my question.”
Lolita looked at me with candor. Then suddenly she smiled.
“Since you know so much, most likely you know what I have once been to Meestair Wyndham. Anyhow I make no lies about that.”
I marveled inwardly at her frankness. She was proceeding without ado. “For a whole week before that night that you speak of—yes, for two whole weeks, I had tried to see Meestair Wyndham. For all those two weeks, he say to me he’s busy here and there.” Lolita sighed, her eyes far away. “You see, he think me a very stupid little girl—how you say it—light of love? Yes? Perhaps that was a little true. We are what we are! Isn’t it so?”
She looked up at me appealingly, her eyes unaccountably welling with tears.
“Anyhow I get tired of always his excuses. That night I want very much to see him. There was a special reason, very urgent. When I called his room he tell me he have his frien’s there. When I suggest I see him later he say he have an appointment. All the time I know I must see him. Between my dance numbers at the Sevilla Biltmore there was always forty minutes intermission. I think to myself I will go down to his room and see for myself if he tell me the truth about all these appointments. I slip my shawl around me and go to his room. Inside there I hear many voices. I listen close. It sound strange in there, like a beeg fight. I think I should leave but somehow I can’t. Then after a while everything grow more quiet. I begin to think soon now he will come out. But just as I say this, everything in the hallway grows black like night. I say, ‘Hurry up, Lolita, go away quick!’ ‘No,’ I make answer to myself. ‘I must stay and see Stephen when he come out.’
“So I waited there, crouched by his door in the darkness. Once some man come to the door, look out, say something, then turn back. The minutes pass. I don’t know how many. I wait and wait. And all the time, no Stephen!
“At last I see a hallboy bringing a lamp toward the room, and I walk off quick so as not to be observed. But not very far, you know. Then as soon as that boy goes, back again I move to wait for Stephen. After a long while the lights come on; I know I must go. I am very disappointed for you see, my American frien’, he never come out that door.” She paused a moment, absently watching a large fly that had come in the window.
“You could swear to that?” I asked in suppressed excitement.
Her eyes met mine without wavering. “I could swear that by the Holy Madonna and all my hopes of Heaven!”
Swiftly I produced a hotel floor plan which I had obtained the night before.
“Señorita, think well! It’s terribly important. This was Wyndham’s room.” I pointed to Room 208. “This was the room where the men were playing cards.” I indicated 209. “And this, Number 210, was the friend’s room. Now, precisely where were you standing?”
Without a moment’s hesitation she indicated the sitting-room door.
“Facing which way?”
“Oh, when the light was on I could see the door to the sitting room and also the next door at number 208.”
“What of Room 210?”
“My back was toward it. But if Meestair Wyndham had come out that door he would have had to pass me to take the elevator.”
Then suddenly, at a moment’s notice, La Caros pursed up her mouth as though in high amusement. She looked adorable. She knew it. She was tempting fate. She knew that too. What she didn’t know was the simple fact that I had an appointment to go swimming.
“You Americans are—how you say it—very funny young men.”
“Er—I suppose so. But let’s not go into that. You said there was a special reason you wanted to see Stephen Wyndham that night.”
All humour suddenly died out of the situation for Lolita Caros. Her expression grew tense.
“Yes.”
“Will you be kind enough to tell me what could have been so urgent?”
Lolita’s face grew hard.
“That I will tell you—nevair!”
“Tst! Tst! Never’s such a long time, Señorita.
You’ll get bored with me long before then, I’m afraid.”
I moved a step nearer the door. Swiftly La Caros divined my purpose and changed her tactics. She pulled her scarf around her and looked at me smilingly.
“Santa Maria! I must go now, really. You will let me pass, please?”
She came very close to me.
Obdurately I shook my head. “First I must know why you thought it so imperative to see Mr. Wyndham on the night of February 13th!”
“I no tell you!” This with a sharp stamp of her foot.
Suddenly, without either of us being prepared for it the half door swung open and Señor José Sanchez, white and disheveled, stood at the threshold. His sudden entrance, like the devastating onsweep of some cyclone, left us both voiceless and aghast.
“Cielo!” he said with an effort of terrible calm. “If she don’t tell you, I will.” He was regarding Lolita with a fixed, glassy stare.
Lolita let out a little shriek and rushed to his side. There was a torrent of Spanish, low and anxious, but with one hand Sanchez grabbed her wrists and with the other he sealed her mouth.
“So,” he said, looking at her calmly. “You went to warn him that night against me, and what I had confided. Bah, ‘quien hace su cama con perros se levanta con pulgas.’ ” He flung her from him and turned bitterly to me. “In other words, my young fellow, ‘he gets flea
s who sleeps with dogs!’ ”
Lolita’s eyes blazed in anger and her hands clenched. “You devil! No miracle I went to warn him against you. To talk to me like that! Santa Maria! First you tell me he have other girl! Next, you tell me he go away and forget all about me. Never once you tell me Meestair Wyndham is supposed to have mysteriously disappear. Why! Why! I wonder!” She looked at him suspiciously. Her slim body shook with the violence of her emotion. “And while we talk of this, something else come to me now. Yes, I wonder was it really only finance matters that take you so sudden to New York last week?”
I looked swiftly toward Sanchez to see what his reaction would be. But unruffled and supercilious, he stood gazing at his wife.
When the force of her passion had spent itself, he nodded to me. “Clever little actress, hein?” Then he made a mock bow, very low and sweeping. He looked contemptuously at the girl.
“Ah. Señora, you ask why I never mentioned this disappearance. Helas! Helas! I have such a great delicacy of sentiment and, remember well, a profound feeling for you!”
There was a peculiar significance to his tone that did not escape me. Swiftly I looked at Lolita to see what her reaction would be. Her face was deathly pale. Her lips parted. Then suddenly, before either of us could prevent it, La Caros had crumbled to the floor in a dead faint.
Chapter XVI THE MAN IN THE ROOM NEXT DOOR
IT was in the midst of brandy, drawn blinds and Sanchez’s curious hovering anxiety and insane penitence that Alcott put his head into the room. In a glance he took in the situation. But the worst was over then. The superb Lolita was gradually returning to consciousness and even Sanchez was regaining some sense.
“You’d better get her home at once where she can recover in comfort,” Alcott suggested to me at the doorway. Then lowering his voice. “Say, Johnny, we haven’t much time to lose ourselves. I’ll be back in a few minutes and by then,” he glanced meaningly across the grey hush of the room, “I’d deucedly like to talk to you alone!”
“But good God, man! . . . You haven’t an idea what we’ve stumbled on!”
“Yes, I have. Just the same get ’em out of here! Quick. Damned quick, if you can! By the way, be sure to tell them sweetly but firmly at parting that if either of them makes a move to leave Havana before you communicate with them, you’ll put them both under arrest before they quite know what’s struck them.”
I wanted to argue. I wanted to cuss, but Alcott was already halfway down the hallway. This once I felt myself in violent opposition to him. From the morning’s developments I felt the Sanchez pair were more deeply enmeshed in Wyndham’s strange end than either of us at first had supposed.
“Damn Pete and his fool ideas!” I mumbled to myself. It was with no little misgivings that I saw Lolita and José Sanchez to the doorway, and made it clear that one false move from them would land them in the hands of the Cuban police. However, at that moment they were impregnable alike to logic or threat. La Caros looked too dazed to even comprehend what I was saying, and though Sanchez nodded absently, by some strange monomaniacal absorption nothing seemed to actually register at the moment except that pale-faced girl who leaned unsteadily against his arm.
As the door closed I shook my head gravely and pulled out the inevitable little memo book. There, with a single dark question mark, I entered the names of my late callers.
As I finished, Alcott was quietly reentering the doorway. Just inside he put his finger to his lips and tossed a hastily written memo my way.
“No questions while in the room. Careful!” I read. Then, in a loud, good-natured tone he called out. “Well! Are you all packed, Ellis?”
“Pretty nearly,” I grumbled. “If you’d plant your lean carcass on the end of this grip maybe I could get it fastened. That is, if you’d keep those flat boats of yours out of the way.”
“Heave ho!”
“Don’t heave ho on that bottle of Bacardi. You’ll smash it.”
“By the by, I got the reservations O.K. but they cost a pretty penny.”
“Yep?”
“Sure. Gerraghty’s a damn fool calling us home at the last minute. A few days more and we might have been finished with this job.” Alcott banged the grips around with a great show of commotion.
“I agree!” But there was a wild inaccuracy in my statement. I didn’t agree. I didn’t understand. Fact is, if it hadn’t been for the reassuring level look in Alcott’s eyes, I should have been certain he was a little out of his head.
He guessed my mental fuddle and drawing me close against the side wall whispered in my ear. “Quick . . . take this. Inside there’s a chair. . . .”
Into my hand he pressed a room key and nodded off toward the hallway. Once outside I observed with no little surprise that the key belonged to a room just two doors to our left. Without a moment’s hesitation I softly moved in that direction and unfastened the lock.
The chamber I entered was an empty hotel room, quite typical, quite orderly and wholly barren of interest. I stood staring at it more doubtful than ever of Alcott’s good sense. Then I remembered his crazy injunction about a chair. A straight backed one stood by a side doorway, which apparently led to an adjoining room.
“H’m, that room would be just next to our own,” I thought to myself.
A moment later, I mounted the chair. On the level with my eyes was a transom with a dark silk curtain over it. I pulled the curtain aside. What I saw at first was simply the dim interior of a room exactly like the one in which I now stood, and for that matter exactly like our own. Then over by the doorway (roughly corresponding to the one at which I myself was standing) I became aware of the figure of a man crouching on the floor, his whole attention strained and riveted on the keyhole in a mad effort to catch what was happening in our apartment. I experienced a peculiar chill of apprehension. There was a certain familiar set to the head. Then the man bent his ear a bit closer to the door crack and I caught a glimpse, of thick, double lens glasses. At that I got down and rejoined Alcott.
As I reentered the door I heard him cheerfully soliloquizing.
“So I said to the guy, if you can’t get us two lowers, get us uppers, put us in the freight car, put us in the trailer, but for Christ’s sake get us something on the train from Miami tomorrow.”
With a wink I chimed in. “That was talking turkey! Say! I wouldn’t like to see Gerraghty’s face if we didn’t show up.”
For answer, Alcott swung a grip up in each hand. Then from the doorway he motioned me to sit tight until he telephoned me from downstairs.
The minutes dragged by heavily. Out of eye range of that odious keyhole, I busied myself moving the chair around with a semblance of great commotion, all the while keeping up a running conversation with a non-existent companion. At first, the by-play was amusing, then somehow it got on my nerves. At one point I got the distinct notion that Stone was softly and stealthily trying to force the door lock. Just then, very luckily Alcott phoned up for me.
As I left the room, I called back with one last grandstand flourish. “Well, Pete, I’ll trot along and explain to Lynn!”
Lynn! Good old Lynn! I thought of her with a twinge of conscience, waiting cool and imperturbably good-humored out at the La Playa Beach—wondering (that is, if I was lucky!) what had happened to me. Well, it served me good and proper. There was no mixing women nor friendship, nor apparently any of the decencies of life into an ugly mess like this.
When I got into the cab which Alcott had waiting, I was still raggy and a little out of humor.
“Whatever your next halt old man, I’m going to La Playa to try to find Lynn Dawson.”
“You’ll find her all right. I sent her word a while ago you’d be a little late.”
I looked at him in amused surprise. “Strangely enough, there are times when you seem moved by something very like genuine intelligence,” I said, with no uncertain meaning.
After a bit, I relented a little. “By the way, it might interest you to know that information y
ou picked up last night was okay. . . . Your friend Sanchez really was in New York just about the time of Meenan’s death.”
“Oh, I hadn’t any doubt of it!” Pete said with a twinkle.
“Well, I had. . . . !”
* * * * *
An hour later, cutting through the clear green Gulf water at La Playa, stroke by stroke, my bad humor melted away. And still later, stretched out indolently on a deserted float I began to feel as though I could have drawn up a very presentable case for this business called living. The reason wasn’t far to seek. Not two feet away Lynn sat, twisting up her funny, freckled nose and looking at me with her straight, clear eyes.
“You’ve changed a lot, Johnny.”
“What did you want? Arrested development?”
“H’m, not exactly. But you’re so much more serious.”
I laughed. “I’ll do a song and dance number as soon as I’m dry. I feel like it anyhow, just seeing you again.”
“Don’t be silly!” Pause. . . . A long one. . . . “What’s worrying you on a grand day like this?”
And then, lying there on the raft, like a weed in the sun, I began to pour out to Lynn, the tale of our difficulties. I’d only just gotten well under way when she sat bolt upright, ripped off her red bathing cap and looked at me quizzically.
“Are you trying to tell me about that Wyndham case, too?” she asked with an unbelieving smile.
“And if I am?”
“Oh, nothing except I’ve been having Stephen Wyndham and fresh pineapple every night with my dinner since I’m in Havana!” She broke off in kind of wonder.
“Johnny, this is the funniest coincidence in the world, and now that it’s happened, I honestly don’t quite know what to do about it.” She paused. “By the way, where are you staying?”