In Cold Pursuit

by Ursula Curtiss

  All at once, as abruptly as it had arisen, the incident was over. The rain-hatted woman vanished in response to an indistinct hail, car doors slammed, Brennan got in beside Mary and switched on the ignition. “I’m sorry,” he said, glancing at her. “So much for short cuts in strange places. I guarantee that we’ll have a drink in hand, one way or another, within the next ten minutes.”

  His tone was free of temper, his hands on the wheel were not. In view of a strange and hollow thumping from the rear at every unevenness in the street, and there were many, Mary thought it diplomatic not to inquire about the extent of the car’s damage. Brennan volunteered it after a block or two, his taut grip relaxing. “We’re not really falling apart, the bumper got ripped loose at one end. What’s the matter?” he asked sharply as Mary leaned forward and stared past him at a brightly lighted corner.

  “Nothing, I just saw someone from the motel,” said Mary inadequately. She craned back as Brennan completed his turn onto the main street, but the doors of the nightclub had already closed upon Astrid and the extraordinary man with her.

  Over a drink, secured almost within the limits of the guarantee, Mary told Brennan about Astrid, omitting out of loyalty her own conviction that the girl’s note had a direct connection with Jenny’s self-destructive urge on the diving board. “The man she was with certainly isn’t her uncle,” she ended. “He—”

  Brennan waited, absorbed, attentive, and Mary realized that she had only started on this at all to dilute the disturbing intensity with which he had studied her across a room instead of across a table the evening before. It came home to her too that to describe Astrid’s companion as dark-blond and fairly tall would be meaningless, like describing a chair as having four legs.

  It was true that she had had only one fast glimpse of that surprising face, but there were faces—or the personalities stamped on them as indivisibly as the light in which they were viewed—for which one glimpse was enough. Further observation could not enhance but only dull the initial impact.

  “They are,” said Mary considering it carefully, “a matched pair.”

  Brennan nodded comprehendingly. He remembered Astrid from the motel dining room, and now he suggested, “She spotted this dazzling fellow, a case of like meeting like, and persuaded her relatives to stay on after all. She looks like a girl who gets her own way without even trying.”

  It was an accurate observation, and a fresh drink was set before them and Brennan was recommending the roast beef. In a small clear interlude a voice at the next table said, “ . . . six years, and that was for a couple of joints! Have you any idea what these prisons are like?”

  The restaurant was expensive, and Mary thought it was time to contribute something to the evening. She asked Daniel Brennan if he came to Juarez often, and he said no, only once or twice a year, in connection with the small prestigious shop in Santa Fe of which he was the business half. Mary, who knew the shop, was somehow surprised. It was the kind of deliberately daunting place that displayed only a very few items at a time—a white basket-work pottery wedding bowl from Acoma Pueblo, or micaceous pottery with the sheen of copper from Picuris, or beaten silver or intricately wrought gold from Mexico. All without price tags, so that to inquire seemed a statement of inability to pay.

  Brennan smiled over his glass. “I agree,” he said to what must have been Mary’s weighing expression, “but it’s very successful. And no worse, you must admit, than those women’s shops where you sit down and an ex-countess goes off and comes back with three dresses.”

  “Oh, you know about those.”

  “Yes.” It was said with finality. “And what about you? If you know about Jaime’s you must be a fairly old hand . . .”

  Was it the superlative roast beef, the icy Carta Blanca ordered with it, the shared near-accident on the way here? Or, more realistically, the brandy? For whatever reason, there came a point when Mary heard herself saying suddenly, “You mentioned something, before, about Jenny being right not to trust you. I can’t help wondering how the rest of that goes.”

  The moment it was said, she wished it back. The man at the next table was going on angrily, “ . . . had to pay for his own crummy bed, for God’s sake, and not an official finger lifted to help. You think he’s going to forget that?”

  Brennan caught Mary’s gaze with his own. “Somehow I liked this better in the car . . . I was never introduced to you. I’d never even seen you before, although I can’t imagine why. I was in the lobby when you arrived with Jenny, and I wanted very much to meet you. You don’t look approachable by strange men, so I asked the desk clerk, who got your name wrong, and when you weren’t in the dining room I thought I’d take a chance on Armand’s, because it’s the nearest restaurant, and there you were.”

  He gave a self-critical shrug. “Adolescent, at best. At worst, travelling-salesman. ‘Haven’t we met before?’ I don’t, I assure you, make a practice of it.” Mary, at something of a loss because he was now openly cataloguing her features as if to remind himself of what had attracted him, or maybe to wonder what had made him bother at all, found her face growing hot for the second time that day. Worse, in self-conscious situations like this, she was unable to return a gaze naturally; people’s eyes separated themselves suddenly into the right and the left, and it was a decision as to which eye to address.

  Their brandy was long finished, and she took refuge in bending for her bag, dropping her cigarettes and lighter into it, saying, “Well, thank you very much—” ambiguous slide into the next phrase “—for a marvelous dinner.”

  Brennan didn’t demur at these unmistakable gestures toward departure. He caught their waiter’s attention and made a scribbling motion in the air, and the waiter came with a promptitude reminiscent of lunch at the Casa de Flores, when Astrid had only to lift her eyes to be supplied almost at once with a daiquiri.

  And that was all, Mary realized with a clarity that had escaped her at the time. Astrid had indicated that she and some companions would be ordering lunch—but long before there would have been any chance of its arriving she had been in the lobby, talking to Jenny in front of the postcard display. She must simply have put down money for the cocktail.

  And two hours after that she had written a note to Jenny. Or someone had.

  . . . The man with Astrid, tonight. A Pied Piper’s face, thought Mary, totally unaware of Daniel Brennan’s curious glance on her own. Indescribable, really, although you could apply certain adjectives. Pointed, with circumflex eyebrows and a cleft in the chin. Dark-blond hair in a kind of helmet effect which wasn’t in the least womanish or, for that matter, hippie-ish. Arm negligently around Astrid, hand resting on her curvy hip.

  Brian Beardsley.

  Something had tugged vaguely at Mary’s mind upon that meeting in the lobby, and now it presented itself with precision. There was nothing in the least babyish about Astrid, she had thought at the time— and unconsciously been balancing Jenny’s vulnerability against sure accomplishment. More: if you searched the earth, it would be hard to find two more dissimilar types than tall, loose-jointed Jenny and cuddle-able little Astrid. Even without her cousin’s starvation campaign, they were like a bold charcoal drawing and an oil of sun-warmed fruit and wine. What a triumph, for a man still stinging from his summary treatment at the Actons’ hands, to flourish Astrid at Jenny, to demonstrate in the most convincing way possible that what had been an upheaval in her life had been an unimportant episode in his.

  Which was exactly what he hadn’t done. In fact, as it would be highly unlikely for two women to go unescorted to a Juarez nightclub, it was the purest chance that Mary herself had seen the two of them at all.

  “. . . Ready?” The check had been paid, the tray with its tip pushed to one side, from an echolike effect on the air Brennan had asked this for the second time. Mary gathered herself at once, saying, “Oh, yes, sorry,” and allowing only one last stray speculation as her coat was held for her. She had wondered, when Jenny retailed the contents of the
note, how Astrid had compressed her message into what was undeniably a single line. She had even seen the handwriting on the envelope, blue and sweeping, and hadn’t made the connection.

  What had Brian Beardsley said to Jenny, using Astrid—satisfying stroke—as addresser and courier as well?

  The rain had stopped, but the gutters rushed with it, and the sidewalks were deeply pooled. Twice on the way to the car Brennan gave Mary an assisting arm, his firm impersonal grip falling away at once. Normally, she would have tried to make amends on the drive back to the hotel; he had after all bought her an expensive dinner, getting his car damaged in the process, and she had rewarded him—and on the heels of that surprising explanation of his behavior— by withdrawing her attention as thoroughly as if she had left the table.

  But the circumstances weren’t normal, and hadn’t been since she had answered the telephone in Santa Fe forty-eight hours ago. Logic spelled out a perfectly safe equation—Brian Beardsley with Astrid, Jenny with Owen St. Ives—but Mary tensed with impatience at a red light, an enforced crawl behind a bus, a stalled car creating a knot of traffic. Moreover, although he saw to it that they did not travel in utter silence, Daniel Brennan had gone into a retreat of his own. He was obviously a man to whom any real or imagined rebuff from a woman presented not a challenge but an occasion for civil goodbyes.

  A van blocking the entrance to Jaime’s courtyard, its luridly painted tiger-eyes glittering with raindrops, was the last straw. Brennan sounded his horn in accordance with the notice on the wall-corner, but Mary already had a hand on the door release. “Would you mind . . .? It’s getting late, and I’m anxious to see if Jenny is back.”

  It wasn’t really late; it only felt that way to newly awakened nerves. And, thought Mary irrelevantly, they hadn’t addressed each other by name all evening.

  “Not at all.” Brennan sent a glance across the puddled flagstones to the wooden stairs rising to the railed walk. There were lights, but of such thrifty wattage that there were stretches of dark. “Will you be all right?”

  “Yes. Thank you again, and I’m sorry—” Unable to complete that, Mary shook her head, smiled, and walked rapidly to the rear entrance of the hotel, beside the bar. She said good-evening to the tireless Raoul, who was apparently in charge of parking problems in addition to all his other duties, and waited at the desk while the clerk addressed the telephone severely in Spanish; something, it seemed, to do with laundry.

  He hung up. Yes, he told Mary, the young lady had picked up the key perhaps ten or fifteen minutes ago.

  In her relief, uncalled-for though she knew it to be, Mary did not look beyond his faintly indulgent smile because Jenny aroused that kind of reaction. She went outside again to the courtyard sounds and sights blocked off before by her sense of urgency: occasional laughter over the syncopated thud of music from the bar, water running pink and gold among the flagstones, the black rain-ruffled droop of the willows around the swimming pool. The van that had blocked the entrance was gone, and Daniel Brennan’s car was presumably slotted away somewhere. She mounted the wooden steps, the shaky rail wet and surprisingly cold under her hand, and walked past a Stygian well housing some kind of machinery to the door of the corner room, and tapped.

  “Jenny?”

  No answer, not even a promising stir. If she had sealed herself into the shower, would she, in view of the time, have left the door unlocked although that was never the best of ideas?

  The door opened under Mary’s hand. The overhead light was on. A length of pink dress almost at her feet sent a terrible bounding through her chest, but Jenny wasn’t inside it. She was under the covers in the nearest bed, face down, black hair every which way, oblivious.

  She had come in a very short time ago, according to the desk clerk. She was almost crankily neat about hanging up her clothes. She had travelled down here with a calico nightgown that seemed to be her favorite, but only her bra strap showed on one bony bared shoulder. She was still wearing her costly pearls. She had ears like a deer, and she hadn’t heard the opening or the closing of the door. Except for the very slight rise and fall of the blanket, she might have been dead.

  “Jenny?” The fear at the pool might have been a rehearsal for this. Mary bent and placed the lightest of fingers on the exposed shoulder, forcing herself to speak calmly although there was something odd and wrong here. “Jenny? . . . Jenny!”

  12

  IT took a frighteningly long time for the extravagant eyelashes to tremble and lift a little, reluctantly, on a flash of white and then dazed gray-blue before they dropped again. Jenny muttered indistinguishably and resumed her sleep. Mary straightened, astonished but relieved at the strong smell of liquor.

  As simple as that, when for an uncountable number of heartbeats the room had seemed full of some unspecified danger. Jenny, acutely self-conscious about her hair and therefore doubly anxious to appear nonchalant and sophisticated to Owen St. Ives, had had drinks she wasn’t used to and—if body weight had much to do with the assimilation of alcohol, couldn’t tolerate. She would almost certainly have required assistance into the lobby for the key, as the clerk would scarcely turn it over to a strange man, and that was the cause of the understanding smile.

  Here, Mary became aware that some of her relief was filtering away. Sitting on the other bed, gazing across at what little she could see of the profile between the long masking strands of hair, she thought uneasily that this looked somehow deeper than sleep, even liquor-induced sleep. Moreover, Owen St. Ives would have seen early what was happening to his young companion, and although there were people who found it entertaining to watch unsuspecting drinkers get drunk, and even fed liquor to parakeets or puppies, Mary was sure that he was not among them.

  Sure? How? Because of some elusive quality of resemblance, she was going by the standards of another man entirely. She had even, although she had not recognized it until now, been deceiving herself into thinking that he felt a bond with her too as well as a compassison for Jenny.

  Out of nowhere, chillingly, flashed a fact so taken for granted after a week’s familiarity that it hadn’t reminded her of its existence at once in this context. At least twice a day, possibly three times, Jenny took some kind of capsule.

  What?

  Briefly, Mary’s skin seemed to blaze over the inner cold. There were medications so incompatible with alcohol—tranquilizers, usually, although why would marionette Jenny of all people be taking tranquilizers?—that the people who combined the two sometimes never woke up.

  By this time she was at the other bed, shaking the sharp-angled shoulder, pushing back the disordered black hair. “Jenny. Jenny. Wake up. Can you hear me? Wake up!”

  It was useless. Jenny’s eyelids would lift a little at the insistent pressure of Mary’s hands and then close again with no trace of any comprehension beyond her own need for oblivion, although once, patently to get rid of this interference, she mumbled “Okay,” and burrowed her face deeper into the pillow.

  There was no point in getting furious at her, and no point either in the self-recrimination at the other end of the pendulum. (You should have known she might do something like this. You knew she was besotted with Owen St. Ives, and you thought yourself that she looked like someone doing a little-girl impression.)

  Above all, it would not help to give way to tears of worry and frustration in spite of a brand-new speculation which had slipped in on the heels of the other like an animal, not a domestic one, taking advantage of an opened door.

  People who made an intensive study of the subject contended that a significant number of automobile fatalities could be considered to be suicides. Jenny had been courting danger at the pool. It was true that she had appeared to snap back to normal, but what if, in a short period of time, she had seen Brian Beardsley with Astrid in downtown Juarez and on top of that made the discovery that St. Ives liked her as an eighteen-year-old but nothing more?

  You don’t know that, Mary informed herself steadily. Jenny is not run-o
f-the-mill.

  She went to the telephone and presently, watching the unmoving, unhearing girl in the bed, got the Casa de Flores and asked for Owen St. Ives. He would certainly be able to tell her something— Jenny’s mood, how much she had had to drink, whether she had taken one of her capsules. Almost from the first the ringing had a futile sound, but she let it go on long enough to penetrate the running of a shower before she hung up and stood for an indecisive moment with her hand on the receiver.

  If she did call back with a message to phone this number, how likely was it that Owen St. Ives, returning, would stop at the desk and inquire? Or that the clerk would keep ringing his room faithfully?

  For the first time, Mary was strengtheningly angry as well as alarmed. It was difficult to deflect Jenny from a chosen course, God knew, but by the very nature of things St. Ives would have more weight with her than anyone else. In view of her age and her current condition, he might have lingered here, at least briefly. Failing that, it should have been no insurmountable task to write a fast note: “Don’t worry, Jenny’s just had a drink too many.”

  Unless he hadn’t realized—but of course he had. He would have seen Jenny up the difficult stairs and inside the room, and he would have known that she was only minutes away from passing out.

  Mary left the telephone, studied her cousin again, hung up the pink dress as if it mattered to be tidy. Jenny’s raincoat wasn’t in the closet, it was on the bathroom floor with an air of having been aimed haphazardly at the door hook. Mary bent for it and felt in the pockets for a piece of paper thrust in bemusedly, but found only a leopard-printed chiffon scarf, a pair of gloves, and eleven cents.