“Yes.”
He turned back to me. “I hope she’s not too cut up.”
“I imagine she’ll get over it.”
The smile came again, warm, intimate, the schoolboy’s smile for his favorite friend. “You’ve been damn decent about it all.”
“Have I?”
“You’re not too disgusted with the way I behaved?”
“I guess I’m not.”
He looked relieved. “What time’s the boat leave, Peter?”
“This evening sometime.”
He dropped down against the pillow and pulled the bedclothes up over his slight body.
“Pretty tired. Think I’ll get a little more sleep.”
“Yes,” I said. “Why don’t you do that?”
I went back to Iris’s room. She was still sitting on the bed.
“He’s going,” I said.
She looked up. “You told him I wasn’t going with him?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he was pretty tired, better get a little more sleep.”
She laughed a sudden, small laugh. “That puts me in my place, doesn’t it?”
“You can’t tell with Martin. Maybe it’s a big shock to him.”
“It isn’t a big shock to him. It’s just another burden dropping off.”
I went to the bed. I sat down by her and took her hand. “More was lost at Mohatch Field, baby.”
Very softly she said, “Where the hell was Mohatch Field, Peter? I never knew.”
“I never knew either. But I guess a powerful lot was lost there.”
She said, “Did he say again that he hadn’t killed Jake and Sally?”
“Yes.”
“And you still don’t believe him?”
I hadn’t really thought about it one way or the other. For me, the problem of the two deaths had become a side issue, almost beneath consideration.
“I don’t know, Iris.”
“How could he have done it? You have to plan, to be ingenious, to get poison. Martin can’t even speak Spanish. Can you imagine him going into a Mexican drugstore and saying, “Give me some poison, please”?”
“I saw him give the capsule to Jake. There was poison in the capsule. Marietta watched Sally’s house. No one went in except Martin.”
I remembered then that I had the bottle of sleeping capsules in my pocket. I had picked them up when I had first gone to break the news of Jake’s death to Martin. I pulled it out. There were only five or six tablets left in the vial. I unscrewed the cap and let the tablets roll out onto my palm.
I said, “He undid the capsule, took out the powder, put in the poison, and fixed the capsule together again.”
I picked up one of the shiny capsules. I held it vertically and cautiously slid the top half off. The white powder was visible in the bottom half. I took another capsule and did the same thing. But, as I split the capsule, my hand suddenly shook. The white powder was there inside. It looked exactly like the other white powder in the first capsule. But there was a terrific difference.
Trading up to me from its interior came the distinct odor of bitter almonds.
I stared at Iris. “Prussic acid. Cyanide.”
Unsteadily, I fitted the capsule together again. I examined all the others. Three of them were normal. The fourth and last gave out that same, sweet, deadly scent.
A truth came to me then so staggering that it took some seconds for me to grasp its implications.
I said, “It wasn’t just the capsule Martin gave Jake. There were two more of them here in the bottle.”
Iris was watching me.
“They all look the same,” I said. “No one could possibly tell by looking which were poisoned and which weren’t. And all three of them were in Martin’s bottle. If he’d wanted to murder Jake, he’d have had a special capsule prepared on the side. He didn’t. He just rolled one out of the bottle. And there were two more…”
She whispered, “Then Martin didn’t murder Jake.”
“How could he have known which were poisoned and which not? And why the hell would he have had two more of them in his own bottle of sleeping pills, the bottle which no one else ever used?”
I said it then. “Don’t you see? Jake’s dying was a sheer accident. Those poisoned capsules were put in there for Martin. Martin’s the one who was meant to be murdered.”
It was hard when I was so tired and spent to have the whole pattern change again. I had grown to accept Martin’s guilt. I had shaped everything around that fact. Martin the destroyer who was to be sent away. Now where were we? Where did we go from here?
Iris’s eyes were fixed on my face. I saw my own weary confusion mirrored there.
“Then who, Peter? Jake?”
“Jake? Jake kill Martin when it was only through Martin that he could get his money? Jake let himself be killed in a trap he set for someone else? No, not Jake.”
She said, “Do you think I would want to kill Martin?”
“No.”
“Then there’s only one person, Peter.”
She took my hand. She said, “It’s better for you to know now, Peter. I tried to tell you earlier, but I couldn’t—not when you said you were going to marry her.”
I felt a cold tingle up my spine. “Tell me what, Iris?”
“When Martin told me he hadn’t killed Sally.”
“What do you mean?”
“He told me why he’d let Jake blackmail him, why he’d put up with all this horror. He hadn’t been the way we thought he was—just thinking of himself. He had a reason.”
She looked away from me. Very softly, she said, “He let Jake blackmail him. And now he’s ready to take the blame for both deaths and go off to Argentina. You see, he stands by her too. He’s just as tied to her as she is to him.”
“You don’t—”
“Yes. From the beginning he’s been certain that Marietta killed Sally.”
The cold seemed to be spreading all through me.
“Because Sally was alive when he left her,” said Iris. “And he saw Marietta waiting around outside the house. She could have gone back, you know.” She turned to look at me then, and her face was drawn with compassion for me. “I’m sorry, Peter. But, if she killed Sally, then she tried to kill Martin too.”
With tormenting clearness I thought of Marietta fighting against her obsession for Martin, knowing that she would be chained to him as long as he lived, seeing her one chance for happiness with me. Marietta, hating, loving, driven by furies, sneaking the poisoned capsules into Martin’s bottle so that Martin would die and she would have her release.
As always, the thought of Marietta brought with it a violent physical reaction. My blood felt like water. Everything in me rebelled against that explanation.
“No,” I said passionately. “No. Not Marietta.”
Iris’s hand was on my arm. There had been that crazy whirligig in time. She was comforting me now.
“There’s no one else, Peter.”
It was the extremity of my want that brought the sudden flash of insight. Like a prayer answered, the realization came that there had been someone else. With an inevitability that was almost uncanny, I saw the real solution, the only solution which brought in every detail and made a uniform design. It wasn’t Marietta. The realization seemed to sing in me. It wasn’t Marietta.
My voice sounding strangely unfamiliar, I said, “Martin got that bottle of sleeping pills from Sally. I remember. He told me back in Taxco. He had come up to see her from Acapulco. He hadn’t expected to spend the night. He hadn’t brought his own. And Sally gave him the bottle. She said he’d left it there. The bottle came from Sally.”
“Sally?”
“Why did Sally change her mind suddenly? Why did she call you and me and Martin telling us to come to her house at certain definite times? The night before, she had been with me. She had been implacable, eaten up with spite. She had sworn she would never give a divorce, that she would make you all squirm
if it was the last thing she did. Why, overnight, did she become sweetness and light?”
A look of half comprehension had come into Iris’s face.
I went on. “Martin said she was pleasant and reasonable with him, told him she would give the divorce. He said she was alive when he left. Why couldn’t he have been telling the truth? Martin said she particularly asked him to give her back the gold ring. Why? And why, if no one struggled with her, was the vase overturned, the slipper in the middle of the room? And why did she choose that of all crazy times, after she had made up with Martin, to begin the letter to Mr. Johnson saying she was afraid, that Martin was going to kill her?”
“Peter, you don’t think…?”
“When Martin left, Sally gave him the bottle of sleeping pills. And when you arrived, at the exact time she had specified, you found Martin’s ring lying on the balcony. Sally must have thrown it there. She was the only person. Why did she throw it there?”
Now that I knew, the whole saga seemed as relentless as a steam roller lumbering forward.
“Sally loved Martin—if you call it love. She told me he was the only man in the world she wanted. She was telling the truth. She loved him, and she hated him when she knew she couldn’t have him any longer. She hated Martin. She hated you for stealing him. She had always hated Marietta for being closer to him than she could ever be. It was a plan, don’t you see, a ruthless, worked-out plan, the sort of plan that could only have come from bitter, vicious malice. From Sally.”
I said, “She knew she’d lost Martin forever. Sally was smart. We’ve always said that. Sally was smart. She knew things. Once he’d left her with you, she knew she’d lost him and would never get him back. She was going to make you all pay. She said that over and over. Pay. She used all her weapons, the bracelet, everything. She went to Acapulco, threatened, and couldn’t make a dent. Martin was unthreatenable. He was through with her, and once he’s through a person doesn’t exist. That’s when she must have realized there was only one way to make Martin suffer. And by then her spite must have grown so deep into her that nothing else mattered. Life wasn’t worth living if she couldn’t get what she wanted, if she had to play the role of the poor little abandoned wife. So she started to make her plan. See, Iris?”
“I think so.”
“She hired Jake. That was the first thing. A private detective to protect her. It was an essential part of the plan. She gave Jake the bracelet and the pawn ticket, the evidence against Martin and Marietta for the original theft. She told Jake the whole story of Martin leaving her and dressed it up with fears that he, or one of you, wanted to murder her. Jake was told he’d been hired to protect her from murder. She built him into the perfect witness for the prosecution, when the prosecution should need a witness.
“After that, she came to Mexico City. She couldn’t resist going to Marietta and making her “pay” a bit, because Marietta isn’t like Martin. Marietta is vulnerable—through Martin. But Sally’s main object was to see me. I had lost my wife to Martin. I was the one person who should have been on her side. She came to me and told me the same story, that one of you was going to murder her. I was meant to be another witness for the prosecution. Only I didn’t play ball. She found I was an enemy, not an ally, so she turned on me, too, added me to her list of victims.”
As I spoke, Sally was vivid in my mind, the little heavy-haired blonde, the eyes burning with malice, the fragile body exuding danger.
“Everything was set then for the plan. She went home. She called Martin. She called you. She called me. She told us all the same story. Everything would be all right if only we came to see her. Each of us got a definite time. She wanted to be sure that we wouldn’t overlap, because the evening was carefully staged as a play with its exits and entrances known in advance. She summoned us all—to a trap.”
Iris didn’t speak. But I could see the horror, the disgust in her eyes.
I went on. “Marietta showed up. That was the one thing Sally hadn’t expected. But it didn’t interfere with the program, because she arrived early. Probably Sally was glad. She hadn’t thought of Marietta, but Marietta had fallen into the trap too. And, after Marietta had gone, the real thing began. Martin arrived. Sally was charming, sympathetic, forgiving. She had rehearsed it that way. All she needed from Martin was his presence, his departure, his ring. It ran smoothly. Martin wasn’t suspicious. Martin never bothers enough about other people to question their sincerity. He gave her the ring. She gave him the sleeping tablets. He left.”
“And after he’d gone,” whispered Iris,” before I was due to arrive…”
“Exactly. After he’d gone, she staged the scene. The slipper on the living-room floor. The overturned vase. A struggle. The ring on the balcony. To point that struggle to Martin. And then the letter. It was never meant for Mr. Johnson. She sat down and rattled it off, stopping before the end, trying to make it look as if she had been disturbed in the middle. It was, of course, just something else for the police. A written accusation left behind that Martin or you or Marietta had killed her. Then everything was set for the final act. The demented thing, the only thing she could do to achieve a real revenge on Martin. Maybe she’d saved one cyanide pill from the bottle of tablets. Probably she did, because she could never be sure that the fall would do its work. The timing was perfect. She knew you would arrive any minute. She took the pill out there on the balcony—and she threw herself over the balustrade down to the stream bed.”
I added softly, “Maybe you were the one she wanted arrested for the murder. Probably you were, because she’d thought out that other way of dealing with Martin. It looked flawless. You would arrive. You would find her dead. The police would come. There was all the evidence in the world in that house to show she had been murdered. And, even if you had been quick-witted enough to destroy it, Jake would appear. Jake, who had been told she had hired him to protect her from you three, Jake who had the bracelet and the pawn ticket, the proof of the theft. It must have seemed inevitable to her that she had made you all “pay” at last.
“There would have been an autopsy. The cyanide, if she took it, would have been the clinching evidence. You would all have been dragged through the courts, and whichever of you was finally convicted, she didn’t have to worry that Martin would get off, because she had, actually, killed him already. The cyanide capsules were there in the bottom of his bottle of sleeping pills. She knew he took them almost every day. It was only a question of time. Just luck that he hadn’t taken a poisoned one days ago—and died.”
Iris shivered. “And it would have happened that way—except for Jake. She didn’t figure Jake out right. She thought he was just a stupid hick detective who could be her stooge after she was dead. She didn’t realize he was a crook, a smart crook. He came to the house, looking for Marietta. He found the body. He thought one of us had murdered her, of course. But he saw how he could use it for his own advantage, so he ruined her plan, he took it over, he used it for himself.”
“Yes.”
“It happened that way, Peter. Of course it did.”
“It had to. Putting everything together, no one else could have killed Sally, no one else could have killed Jake.”
Looking back, it was terrifying to think there could have been that much warped, sadistic spite in one little woman. And yet, it was right. I thought of Sally at the bullfight, bright-eyed while the darts stabbed into the bull. The clue had been there for me from the beginning. The desire to destroy, the desire to be destroyed. Sally had reached the top of her hill all right and found there enough nightmare to satisfy even her.
I thought how her little ghost seemed to have been twittering always close to us through these last terrible weeks. Really, Peter, it’s worth being dead for. Ever since that night in Taxco, we had, without knowing it, been puppets dancing to her tug of the strings. She’d had her heart’s desire, even if it hadn’t come in the way she had expected. She’d done it. She’d made us “pay”.
The room w
as quiet. Even Veracruz outside seemed uncharacteristically subdued.
Close to me on the bed, Iris said, “How happy she’d be if she could see us now.”
Her voice brought me back. “At least we’re not dead.”
“No,” said Iris. “We’re not dead. We fooled her there.”
I picked up the bottle which held the capsules. We both looked at it with a sort of horror, as if we were looking at Sally.
Iris’s expression changed. A new dread came that seemed to have nothing to do with Sally.
“We’ll have to tell Martin.”
“I guess so.”
Her voice faltered. “And when he knows it wasn’t Marietta, he’ll know he won’t have to take the blame. He won’t leave for Argentina.”
“Maybe he won’t.”
Iris seemed to draw herself in, to become smaller. I knew what she was thinking, and pity for her clamped onto my heart like a cold hand.
“Peter, if he doesn’t go, it’ll all be the same again.” She looked up. Her eyes were haunted. “I haven’t got the strength to leave him. I’ll hang on, hoping, kidding myself, hating myself. It’ll go on and on…”
She broke off. Her hands clung to my arms fiercely.
“Please, Peter, let him go. Don’t tell him about Sally. Let him still think it was Marietta. Let him go.”
I hated looking at her. I put my arm around her and drew her close to me. Marietta had cried to me for help, and I had gone to her with all pennants flying. I was going to marry her. Now Iris was crying for help, and all I could do for her was that one small thing. Marietta had me as an anchor. The Havens always found an anchor. It would take months for Iris to find herself again, and there was no one for her—nothing.
If only she had broken down, it would have been easier.
“Don’t worry, baby,” I said. “Martin will go. I won’t tell him anything.”
Twenty-seven
I was back in my own room. I was afraid to stay with Iris. It hurt too much knowing I couldn’t comfort her. Sunlight sparkled crisply over the faded carpet. The weather was going to be fine for the last day of the carnival. I had been up all night and felt it. I loosened my tie and dropped into a chair. I took out a cigarette and faced what lay ahead.
Puzzle for Pilgrims Page 20