Mary had been intermittently aware of it in the rear-view mirror, but in a day of regulated speed— although most cars on this road nudged sixty and now and then one flashed by at well over seventy—it was possible to travel as far as Las Cruces in a kind of informal convoy. But this was also the loneliest stretch of the journey, with only crows and an occasional circling hawk in the nearby landscape, and the corroboration of the following car made her very slightly nervous. What if Brian Beardsley had simply been keeping an eye on the house for Jenny’s emergence?
Well, what if he had? He’s served a term for aggravated assault, that’s what, thought Mary, and eased the speedometer up to sixty-five. The blue car with its single occupant came along as if on an invisible string, but, again, there were drivers who automatically maintained the speed of the vehicle ahead.
Jenny craned over. “Won’t you get a ticket at this rate? I mean if anybody ever patrols this highway?”
She was certainly very law-abiding for someone who had adopted such a rebellious stance over her own affairs—and, like many visitors, she seemed to find the Southwest interesting but a little comical, an area put together amateurishly by well-intentioned people who had not had the advantage of seeing how things were done in the East. “Certainly it’s patrolled,” said Mary, nettled because it was undeniable that they hadn’t seen a single police car in well over two hundred miles. “You didn’t think those were real crows, did you?”
At the same time, she flicked on her right indicator and began to move off the road. “Rest area,” she said briefly in answer to Jenny’s question. “Stretch our legs.”
The blue car cruised steadily by, was a heat-shimmered blur, was gone. Still, Mary did a little unhurried strolling around in the wind and sun after she had deposited the lunch litter in a trash can, although Jenny retreated almost at once with defensive hands on her hair, before she got back behind the wheel. They had travelled about five miles when they encountered the blue car again, pulled off in the emergency lane with its flashers on and its hood raised. Its driver, obviously investigating the engine, was visible only as a pair of trousered legs.
Such a sight wasn’t at all uncommon on a trip of this length, but Mary wondered that Jenny, who had commented on the car in the first place, made no remark. A fast side glance showed her why: Jenny had dragged her hair over one shoulder and was making her several-times-daily count of her split ends.
They entered a stretch of road where fresh tarring was going on, with flagmen in attendance, and after that a glance at the gas gauge indicated a stop so that they would not have to bother about this particular errand in Juarez. Here, the youth in charge of the hose hung it up when the tank had been filled, proceeded around to the front of the car, bent, straightened, summoned Mary out.
“See that blister?”
Mary bent in turn, but didn’t.
“You got a bad soft spot there, that tire could go any time. If it was me, I wouldn’t want to take a chance. Matter of fact—” he advanced on the left front tire, squinted, kicked, shook his head “—you got a worse problem there. See that crack?”
Fortunately, from experience and the advice of male friends, Mary knew this approach, used mainly when there were only women in a car although a man wearing coat and tie in the summer could also be considered fair game. She said, “Thank you, I’ll have them both taken care of just as soon as I get back to Santa Fe,” and observed him taking angry swipes at his hair with a comb as, presently, she pulled away.
There was a new bridge by which to enter Juarez, and she got briefly lost looking for it. Jenny came to life and was told out of Mary’s slender store of Spanish that ropas meant clothing and cerveza, beer; she figured out licores by herself. She was astonished at the swarm of tiny tumble-down adobe houses visible on the slope of a hill even before they crossed the border, and the number of people plodding patiently along the foot-walks on the bridge. “Why are there so many of them?”
“Wages are a lot higher in El Paso.”
“But some of them are going the other way. Could they smuggle grass?”
Hardly, said Mary, although she had heard of parrots being introduced illegally into the United States by that means. Significant amounts of marijuana came in by planes flying too low for radar observation and making lightning drops in deserted areas. She was having to concentrate on the traffic now, because of the usual bottleneck at Immigration even though obvious tourists were waved through for the price of fifteen cents. She noted automatically that in this gaggle there were a number of blue cars.
Jenny asked curiously, “Can you get out just as easily?”
“Well, not quite.” Mary fended off an orange Maverick which was trying to usurp her right of way and leave her stranded while other bumper-to-bumper cars followed it. “If you’ve spent more than twenty-four hours in Mexico and have luggage, they take a look at it, even though they rely mostly on informers for their real catches. I’ve never been subjected to an intensive search, but I know people who have.”
These questions arose out of natural curiosity about a foreign country, she thought, but for some reason it seemed wise to add, “I wouldn’t care to get mixed up with the Mexican authorities in any way. They feel strongly about all kinds of things.”
Jenny gazed straight ahead behind her concealing glasses. “I’ve heard about their jails,” she said.
The Casa de Flores justified its name; there seemed to be more flowers, in round and square and oblong beds, than clipped green grass surrounding the cobbled forecourt with Moorish arches and a lot of dark-tinted plate glass. The distances everywhere were silvered by sprinklers and fountains.
Jenny, who seemed to have been expecting something quite different, was visibly impressed. In the huge ornately furnished lobby, Spanish-tiled and almost stumblingly dark to eyes just out of the sunlight, Mary was not so sure. A desk clerk with luxuriant sideburns studied her with admiration just short of a wink, let his gaze roam over Jenny with open astonishment, and continued what was clearly a personal telephone call before hanging up, pushing a registration form across the counter, and presently snapping his fingers at a bellboy. Fast Spanish was used, which had an excluding air.
The night before, Mary had asked for and been blandly assured of a room near the pool. She ought to have realized that in hotel parlance “near” was a very flexible word. The fiftyish bellboy conducted them out of the lobby, under one of the arches, up two wide shallow half-flights of stairs, and along a broad and occasionally alcoved corridor of sepulchral chill: “We must be a third of the way home,” muttered Jenny over her shoulder. He stopped at one of the planked and pointed doors, produced a key large and heavy enough to serve as a weapon, opened the door with a flourish.
But not before another door, two down and at the end of the corridor, had come snapping open—at the bellboy’s burdened tread, the tap of Mary’s heels, the slap of Jenny’s sandals?—and a man’s head emerged. There was something enormously vigilant about this simple action. A cart laden with used plates and glasses and silver reposed outside, which at close to four o’clock would seem to indicate that the occupants were extremely late lunchers or the Casa de Flores was leisurely about cleaning up after room service.
The edge of Mary’s vision saw the bellboy lift a semaphoring hand in what was unmistakably a gesture of reassurance. The head down the corridor withdrew itself and the door closed, and she was looking into a room with twin beds, a bureau and desk of carved dark wood, two lamps with enormous shades, two chairs upholstered in turquoise and gold, two paintings of Inquisition-like grimness.
The bellboy said something commanding in Spanish and flung open doors first on a closet and then a bathroom with a long sweep of mirror over a marble counter with inset sink and a great deal of ornamental tile. He gazed expectantly.
“It’s very nice,” said Mary. “Muy—” but the proper word escaped her, as did the framing of any circumspect query about that apparition down the corridor. Something about the im
passive dark eyes, combined with the signal, told her that she wouldn’t have learned anything anyway. She tipped the bellboy, asked for ice, realized that she should have reversed this procedure, turned back into the room to find Jenny gazing at her with respect. “I didn’t know you spoke Spanish.”
“I don’t, beyond about twenty-five words. I keep meaning to take a course, but they have it while I’m having my dinner so one of us will have to reschedule.” Now that they were actually here and established, with a suggestion of sufferance in spite of the steep price, Mary felt vacant with fatigue, but she knew that there was something essential missing from the room. Not their suitcases—Jenny was now rummaging through hers and plucking out her bathing-suit—nor the bag containing the Bacardi and limes and fruit juice for which she had stopped at a market on the way . . .
“I’m going to take a shower, unless you want to be first,” said Jenny, and Mary stared at her, suddenly transfixed, realizing what she had been failing to find on any of the surfaces in the room. “Our books. I thought we took them out of the car?”
“We did. I put them on top,” said Jenny, dawningly anxious because she was a reader too, “while I got our coats. Do you suppose they’re still there?”
“Either that or they’ve been turned in at the desk. I’ll call.”
But she didn’t, at once; even though the books were of the essence because she had only a single half-read paperback in her bag, and she was certainly not going to drive back over the bridge to El Paso for reading matter tonight, Mary felt incapable immediately of a simple, or possibly not so simple in this place, telephone call.
The shower began some tentative starts and stops, as if it had baffling controls, and the bathroom door opened a crack. “Mary? Would you hand me in my shower cap? I think it’s in the lid of my suitcase.”
“If you’ll hand me out half a glass of water.” The ice was clearly going to come at a snail’s pace, and a drink would have a restorative effect.
Jenny was aghast at the suggestion, but Mary assured her that the water was perfectly safe in places like this. She found the shower cap—pale yellow, frilled at the edge, giving Jenny, who had modelled it for her one evening when she was feeling sportive, a ruffly blonde look at odds with her long introspective face—and the exchange was made.
Mary’s Mexico-going knife, useful for peeling fruit from the market, turned up in the bottom of her handbag and she cut a slice of lime to add to her drink. It tasted rewarding indeed after the long drive. The heavy door onto the corridor was not as soundproof as its appearance suggested, because over the rush of the shower Mary could hear a fast incomprehensible interchange of Spanish and then a rattle of china and glasses as the cart outside that other room was towed away.
Who was in it, so extraordinarily watchful and alert? The Mexican divorce laws had been revamped, so that Juarez was no longer a Mecca for film and other celebrities. But possible causes for nervousness would make a long list, and crossing a border was automatically a kind of refuge. Certainly —and here Mary spelled it out for herself—the man was nothing to do with her or Jenny. Henrietta Acton, panicky about her only child and warned by the earlier leakage, would not have mentioned the Juarez trip to anyone at all. And Jenny, ahead of Mary and so with a better look at that out-thrust face, had registered no reaction whatever.
But then, she wouldn’t. And she had been completely willing, almost eager to come down here. Mary had to acknowledge the fact, queerly not considered before, that she hadn’t the faintest idea what Brian Beardsley looked like.
This was nerves, born of temporary fatigue; she was not one of the ironclad people who could drive for a good part of the day, take a quick shower, and be ready to leap into the local scene. She would have to be careful about imagining Beardsley everywhere; look at her real if fleeting suspicion of the blue car which had followed them so faithfully for so long.
Moreover, that fast assessment from two doors away hadn’t seemed in any way personal. It might have been made by someone detached and professional—almost, thought Mary with unknowing irony, a bodyguard.
In Santa Fe, Meg Taylor, in charge of the house while their widowed mother was in the hospital, was saying suspiciously to her younger sister, “I saw you talking to that man this morning. What did he want?”
“What man?” Pippa, who looked at least three years older than her actual fifteen, had lately taken to fluttering her eyelashes at every male who happened her way, and this had led to a number of unwelcome lectures.
“I turned back to put a letter in the mailbox and I saw you,” said Meg, grim and insufferable with authority, “and you know how Mom worries about the way you behave. Who was he?”
“I don’t know, just somebody looking for that weird girl who’s staying with Mary Vaughan,” said Pippa, sulky. “She came along early this morning looking for the newspaper after Samuel chewed it up —” at the mention of his name the Great Dane ducked his head coyly, like a dog being complimented “—and I told her we’d try to keep him in tomorrow morning and she said not to bother because they wouldn’t be getting a paper, they were going to Juarez. So that’s what I told this man, and then, naturally, he asked me to run away with him but I said my sister was in charge of my entire life and I had to get permission first.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Meg, and, in a fault-finding mood because in spite of her mother’s injunctions and her own harangues on the subject she was being stuck with the housework as well as all the cooking, “I shouldn’t think you’d hand out information like that to a total stranger.”
Pippa rolled her eyes for patience. “Gone to Juarez,” she said scornfully. “Big deal.”
4
HOW dangerously close he had come to fatal error.
She had gotten farther than he had expected on the very little gas remaining in her tank, which had worked out so well, as he had failed to immobilize her at her house, that it seemed an omen. The outskirts of the city were behind them, the traffic very light, the fir-lined drive of some state building a pure gift when he saw the car falter to a stop on the shoulder.
They would be walking back, and they would be looking into the sun—or if by any chance she had sent her minion to a gas station and remained in the car by herself, that would be even better. But no: there was a distant flicker of color and motion between chinks in the firs.
Here they came, Mary Vaughan fortuitously on the outside. He said her name to himself often now; that barrier was not only down but trampled upon. If he had spoken it aloud, it would have had a crooning inflection.
He mustn’t let them get too close, as he would have to gather a killing speed. He glanced to his left: nothing coming. He reminded himself about impact—he had once hit a large dog and the resulting jar had been considerable—and put the car in motion.
Blare.
Out of nowhere, light gray against the light gray highway, came a Volkswagen van, slowing, stopping with only one possible purpose—and when Mary Vaughan had been close enough for her voice to have been audible if it hadn’t been for the wind. He struck the rim of the steering-wheel bruisingly hard with his fist.
The Volkswagen’s engine revved noisily and then receded, leaving the roadside empty. His head had cleared enough for a mordant thought. Mary Vaughan had all the earmarks of an attractive young woman, and angels of mercy did not always turn out to be that. Wouldn’t it be funny if. . . ? No, it wouldn’t be funny. She belonged to him alone; in a way she was as much his possession as his wife had been.
He waited five minutes, ten, got out of the car and peered around the edge of the firs. Even at that distance the clear air showed him when the driver of the van came into view, the transfer of gas evidently complete, and climbed into it and drove off.
Mary Vaughan would almost certainly go into Belen, the nearest town, for a fill-up—and she turned off at the first exit. He didn’t follow her, in case any of the paintwork had shown when he started out of the drive, and he was confident that the cooler indic
ated a destination beyond that. Again he waited, and she reemerged onto the highway in about twenty minutes. He settled down to what he suspected would be a long drive, quite glad now of the Volkswagen’s intervention. She wouldn’t have known what struck her, literally, and that was scarcely fair. She must be allowed time to know what was about to happen to her, and to plead.
Her pull-off at the rest area worried him briefly, but he reasoned that she was consulting a map or simply taking a break from driving, because the time to turn back—knowing herself to be a murderess, suddenly aware of being followed, deciding to go to the police for protection—would have been at Belen. He drove on for a few miles before he stopped, raised the hood of the car, ate the sandwich he had bought at the diner where he had had breakfast, with the knowledge that this day might take a peculiar shape, drank the accompanying carton of cold black coffee.
With the coffee, because one of the headaches that had so disturbed his wife was beginning to clamp around the base of his skull, he took a tranquilizer.
When his rear-view mirror showed him a dot in the heat-shimmer he pulled on his flashers, got out of the car, prepared to lean invisibly in over the engine. His quarry drove past him, but so, by the time he had thumped the hood down and gotten back behind the wheel, did a huge semi, rocking him in its wake as it roared by, flanked in the other lane by a camper.
After all those empty miles it was like having a cliff rear up ahead. The camper hung just behind the truck’s left rear wheel, not allowing an opening, and when he moved over behind it and sounded his horn the driver extended his arm in a severe, palm-down waggle.
He saw the Las Cruces exits go by, but each time the gray bulk obscured the ramps. Presently the semi commenced to slow, but as it was still travelling over the speed limit the camper stayed in position. They proceeded in a locked-in trio almost as far as the truck weighing station, and when the distance was visible again he was almost furious enough to try to drive the camper off the road as he shot by it.
In Cold Pursuit Page 3