In Cold Pursuit

by Ursula Curtiss

The straw handbag was on the floor too. Mary zipped it open and combed rapidly through the contents for the small silver pillbox with a turquoise set in the lid which Jenny had bought in Santa Fe the day after her arrival (“Might as well be fancy about it”). It was empty, which told her nothing because she didn’t know when it had last been filled from the mother lode in Jenny’s suitcase.

  Mary did not put the pocketbook down at once. Feeling that something important hinged on this, she made a thorough search for that other and actual note. It wasn’t in the wastebasket, and Jenny could hardly have chewed it up and swallowed it, like a spy. And it was not an infringement of rights. In Santa Fe, she had heard a siren and assured herself that someone was in charge out there—but now she was in charge.

  She found what she was looking for wedged into the thin folder of traveller’s checks—for sentimental reasons, incredible though that seemed, or so that Jenny could remind herself that a man capable of this casual cruelty wasn’t worth disrupting her life and alienating her parents for? It was a single line in a tight and punishing little hand: “How do you like my girl? Pretty, no?”

  There was no signature, mockingly, but Jenny would know his writing. In view of her emaciation, it was like a kick at the head of someone who had stumbled and fallen, and all the more wounding because it was reasonable to believe that Astrid had shared in the fun. Mary thought back to her cousin’s simple admiration of the other girl, felt like tearing the note into savage little pieces, put it scrupulously back instead.

  . . . And how many moments lost here? Jenny was still deep in the sleep that might be natural under the circumstances or might be very dangerous indeed— was dangerous in any case, Mary realized suddenly, because it would be impossible to arouse her if necessary. This was an old building with a lot of wood, and if someone dozed off with a cigarette . . .

  If she started thinking like this she would panic completely. Ask Daniel Brennan’s advice before she tried to locate an English-speaking doctor and set events in train for which Jenny would probably never forgive her? He was right here at the hotel, and at some point he might have dealt, as Mary had not, with someone in this semicomatose condition; he might reassure her that it was simply a matter of sleeping it off.

  Daniel Brennan was not in his room, and now her throat did begin to prickle.

  Ask for the number of a doctor right now? But he would ask a few preliminary questions for which she should try to have intelligent answers, and Mary put the receiver back and went distractedly to feel the pulse in the wrist that might have been that of a young child. It was a ridiculous gesture, she knew as she made it: she had no idea of what a sleeper’s pulse should be, let alone a drunken sleeper’s, let alone a drunken sleeper’s who couldn’t be considered in normal health and had probably taken an unknown medication.

  Still, Mary tried to assess the beat; it seemed light and far-spaced, but that might have been in contrast to her own speeded-up and violent pulse. She tucked Jenny’s arm back and pulled the blanket higher, because the room wasn’t warm, trying the usual talisman: someday I’ll look back on this and wonder how I could have gotten so . . . But it didn’t work, because she knew she would not forget this.

  The suitcase, then, because once in a blue moon prescription labels contained actual information. There wasn’t a tremor of awareness from Jenny at its thump on the neighboring bed, the sharp clicks from the catches. Mary pressed testingly on the contents in search of something hard and glassy, had to delve. A promising resistance inside one slipper proved to be cologne. She extricated the other slipper, and shook out a bottle nearly half-full of yellow-and-white capsules.

  It was not one of the blue-moon instances. The label carried only Jenny’s name and the doctor’s, a date in March, and instructions to take one capsule three times daily.

  There went the hope of an intelligent answer for a doctor. Fleetingly in a rage at Jenny and Dr. J. Wittenbaugh, and the Actons and Owen St. Ives and Daniel Brennan, Mary put the bottle back in its nest and yanked up folds of clothing to replace the slipper beside its mate.

  Her uncaring fingers touched more than fabric and the daytime sandals parcelled out neatly at the sides of the suitcase. With a crackle electrifying in the silent room—Jenny a very concentration of stillness in her eerie sleep—a twist of newspaper, so tightly gathered as to have a recoil when it was nudged, flew free.

  Another auxiliary bottle of capsules? No. A pair of pottery birds for salt and pepper, undoubtedly Jenny’s house present for her. These were not gift-shop robins or canaries: the painted eyes were fierce and alert, the feathers a subtle gradation of slate-blue and mushroom and wheat-color under the high hard glaze. More carefully this time, Mary reached in to bundle the inevitable Mexican wrapping tight together again, and snatched her hand back and stared at her fingers.

  Salt and pepper shakers did not come filled with anything, and this was in any case softer than salt, almost like powdered sugar with a faint suggestion of glisten. Mary did not taste it as detectives did in books, because she wouldn’t have had any idea of what to expect and she felt that she didn’t have to. This was cocaine or something like it. Buried at the bottom of a suitcase which in the normal course of events she would never have penetrated, introduced so hastily that one of the small bottom corks had not been pushed quite home.

  An echo came back. Jenny, after they had been beckoned through Customs: “Can you get out again just as easily?”

  Jenny, intimate of a known user.

  But even if she had been so inclined—and she is not, said Mary steadily to herself—she would have had no knowledge of how to obtain the drug and no opportunity. Except for brief periods at the swimming pool, and the few requested minutes to shop alone and a fast foray for the morning newspaper at the Casa de Flores, she had been constantly with Mary.

  In addition, this obvious cache, as opposed to the astonishing ingenuities cited in the newspapers, seemed meant to be found, had perhaps already been reported. As far as statistics were concerned, Jenny fell into the right age group and came from the East, where the street price for drugs was reportedly higher than in the Southwest, so close to the border.

  The Mexican attitude toward Americans engaged in drug traffic within its boundaries was ferocious, and although there was now a treaty for prisoner exchange it would not, if it was like most governmental processes, be enacted with any particular speed in individual cases. The U.S. Embassy, if not quite taking a detached stance, was relatively powerless. Mary thought about what she had heard of Mexican prisons —and in fact listened to in scraps tonight at dinner; thought about Jenny in her vulnerable sleep, felt cold to her marrow.

  Before a doctor, before anything, this terrifying white substance had to be disposed of, the pottery birds washed, the suitcase lining washed too. Because the newspaper wrapping had been so very tight, Mary didn’t think that any of Jenny’s clothes had been in contact with the drug, but she would have to make sure.

  She had a desperate sense of haste, and her hands tended to shake. She lifted out garments, placed them to one side, carried the newspaper bundle carefully to the bathroom sink. She would flush away the cocaine, if that was what it was, and burn the wrappings later. And then she would—

  Like a loud cry of warning, the telephone rang.

  “I still think it was kind of a dirty trick,” said Astrid pensively in the car driving north through the fringes of El Paso.

  She had collected her promised due of dinner in a Juarez nightclub as a reward for her day’s activities. First, the contrived meeting with Jenny Acton, then the hoped-for, almost predictable ride into town with her and Mary Vaughan: people who came to Mexico generally did shopping or sight-seeing. The instant taxi back to the Casa de Flores, where the clerk who had seen her in conversation with the two did not demur at all at giving her the key to her room when she said that she had left her wallet there.

  The identification of the proper suitcase was as simple as she had been led to believe, and she hadn
’t even had to use the little lock-pick she had been given. The pottery birds were made to order, although it didn’t really matter where she put the stuff, just so long as Jenny Acton wouldn’t notice it at once. Then downstairs again, and the prepared envelope handed to the clerk with a winning smile: “I thought I’d explain to them in case we miss each other later on.”

  Brian Beardsley turned his head now and looked at her in the dim dashboard glow. “They lost me my job,” he reminded her simply. “It’ll teach them a lesson, that’s all.”

  “But she won’t really have to go to prison or anything, will she?” pursued Astrid.

  She was younger than Mary Vaughan had thought, twenty, a college drop-out from North Carolina with a sense of values that shifted about like patterns in a kaleidoscope. As a beauty from the cradle on, she had been spared the tiny battles and skirmishings-for-position and despairing Saturday nights of most girls, and it might have been partly boredom that had led her to become involved with drugs in her freshman year. (She could easily uninvolve herself; she just hadn’t wanted to yet.) Drifting to New York in the company of her roommate, she had encountered the incredible man at her side, and come willingly with him to Santa Fe and then Juarez.

  Astrid had not seen any articles about Americans in Mexican jails for the simple reason that she never read newspapers: why distress herself with smolderings in the Middle East, earthquakes, politics, the chroniclings of children with leukemia? Still, into the oddly contemplative silence of the car, she repeated, “She won’t really—”

  “No problem,” lied Brian Beardsley with calm. “Her people have money. They can get her out with a telephone call.”

  “Oh, good,” said Astrid, who believed herself to be thinking quite rationally but was not, “because even though she’s so skinny and all she seemed kind of nice. Well, I mean, you used to like her, didn’t you?”

  She would be a lot skinnier before long, thought Beardsley, and viewed with pleasure the powerful Actons coming humbly to a Juarez jail with food packages and perhaps medicines for their incarcerated daughter. He said indifferently, “She’s not a bad kid.”

  And in fact for a time he had found Jenny different and interesting, a combination of cynic and believer in Santa Claus. His friends had looked upon her in the light of a mascot, and there had been a certain pride in the conquest—and there was, he discovered to his real surprise, the Acton money, unsuspected because of Jenny’s casual and spent-looking wardrobe. He could do worse; he could do a whole lot worse.

  The Actons had smiled reservedly on Jenny’s announcement, and even—a declaration of upper-echelon war?—produced champagne in crystal glasses. Two weeks to the day, his employer had told him stiffly that they could scarcely have a man under investigation in the firm. His rage had been such that he had not made any attempt to see Jenny again but begun to ponder, instead, how he could pay these people back.

  . . . As he had done, with his telephone call to the police just before he and Astrid left their motel; it seemed a good idea, on several counts, to be back over the border when they descended. He began to watch for the signs that would direct him west and eventually to California, where he knew a way to disappear for a while in case the Actons should think to point an accusing finger. It would be a pity in a way to divest himself of Astrid, but she was much too memorable and he had a friend who would like her.

  And here she was, starting off about Jenny again: “Poor kid . . .” He turned on her with an intensity that made her cower against the seat. “How many times do I have to tell you that she’ll be all right, for Christ’s sake?” He grew calmer, with effort. “If you want somebody to feel sorry for, try me. I’ve got a four-hour drive to Nogales, while she’s tucked up in her little bed . . .”

  13

  “Mary. I tried to call you a few minutes ago but your line was busy,” said Owen St. Ives. “Tell me, how is Jenny?”

  Mary closed her eyes and took a long breath, holding it for a few seconds out of sheer relief. “Asleep, or rather out cold. I’ve been frantic.”

  “But you saw my note.”

  “No, and I looked, and I couldn’t—but I found . . .” This was near-incoherence; she must not babble. Into it, sharp as a flare of light, shot the memory of St. Ives in conversation with the chambermaid, the woman with the ready key. “. . . her doctor’s telephone number, in New York. I was going to call him,” said Mary. She steadied her fingers around the receiver, because she had arrived on safe ground. “Owen, what did Jenny have to drink?”

  “A whiskey sour, which she must have sipped at for forty minutes, and a beer with dinner, which I thought at the time she had eaten most of,” said St. Ives with a trace of grimness which Mary could understand: Jenny was an artist at concealing whole portions beneath a leaf of lettuce or a potato shell. “So far, so good. The people next to us were having brandy, and Jenny looked interested. By this time I had a notion that she wasn’t used to drinking at all, but the waiter came up, they’re good at this, and asked if we’d like a liqueur. I said I didn’t think so but Jenny said yes, she’d like a brandy.”

  Mary turned her head and glanced at her cousin. It seemed somehow weird that they were discussing her in this detail and she wasn’t hearing.

  “Everything still seemed pretty much all right, until she spilled some of the brandy on herself,” went on St. Ives. “It was—like lightning, I’ve never seen anything like it before, and she seemed as astonished as I was. I wish I’d had a clue.”

  It was a rueful comment; he was neither accusing nor defensive. Mary said honestly, “I didn’t know either.” For the first time it occurred to her that the evening must have been difficult for him. But she also thought that it wasn’t such a staggering amount of liquor, taken over a period of time and with food, particularly as Jenny hadn’t gotten to drink all of her brandy.

  On the other hand, after that promising beginning at lunch, Jenny had consumed only half of her chicken sandwich and that had been a number of hours earlier. “Did she take a capsule, by any chance?”

  “I think . . .” Small pause, in which Mary could picture a frown, followed by certainty. “Yes, I know she did, although she was very unobtrusive about it.” Again he was right; even with Mary, Jenny tended to use sleight-of-hand over this ritual. “She didn’t— I’m sorry to keep asking you all these questions, but I’m worried about her—she didn’t seem upset about anything, did she?”

  “Not at all, she was enjoying herself right up until the fatal moment, or so she said. When I got her up to your room I tried to persuade her to vomit,” said St. Ives sensibly, “but she wasn’t interested in anything but going to sleep, so I just left you a note explaining what had happened so you wouldn’t worry. I didn’t dare lock her in, so I took a chance that you’d be back soon. I really don’t think you have anything to be concerned about. She had all the classic symptoms—glazed eyes, cold sweat, the staggers —only speeded up, like a fast film. She must be one of those people who can’t drink.”

  Mary hoped irrelevantly that Jenny would remember very little of all this; she did not need any more humiliations. She heard St. Ives say after another short pause, “Shall I come over and have a look at her? I’ve probably put more people to bed than you have.”

  “Oh, no,” said Mary quickly, remembering the all-important task waiting for her in the bathroom basin. “I’ll be fine, now that I know what happened.”

  She said goodnight, realizing after she had hung up that she hadn’t thanked him for taking care of Jenny, realizing too that a part of her worry—the inability to get her cousin on her feet and moving if necessary —remained unsolved. She closed that thought off, because this was a time when she had to be very calm and single-minded.

  She flushed the white substance down the toilet, set a match to the newspapers in the sink with their powdery residue, washed the pottery birds although only one had been involved, washed the sink itself. Her hands were more reliable now, and she knew that it had been ridiculous to susp
ect St. Ives, however fleetingly, of this vicious thing. Even granted some reason for wanting to harm Jenny, and that was hard to grant, he had had all the opportunity in the world tonight. He would only have had to topple her casually into the swimming pool under the willows and go on his way; alcohol would have done the rest.

  The answer had been there all along, from that moment of absolute certainty in the parking area at the Casa de Flores. It hadn’t been enough for Brian Beardsley to show Jenny his succulent new girl while staying out of sight himself like a malicious child. By involving her with drugs he could really punish her, and her parents as well.

  What would have happened if she hadn’t disturbed the contents of Jenny’s suitcase right down to the bottom? An informing telephone call leading to their apprehension, because with all that spite Brian Beardsley would surely have gotten the automobile license number from Astrid. Her and Jenny’s insistence that they knew nothing about any cocaine; it had been planted there. (This must be a plea familiar to the point of boredom.) By whom had it been planted, did they think, and why?

  It was within the bounds of possibility—but barely, thought Mary, remembering detailed and bitter newspaper accounts—that the Mexican police might have tried to inquire locally about a Brian Beardsley, who would have taken the elementary precaution of registering under another name.

  How fragile it would all sound anyway, particularly to the Latin temperament: these machinations so long after the fact, and especially when the man in question had a new and much prettier companion.

  Astrid. Mary found her as hard to forgive as a poisoned apple. Looked back upon, she had picked them up as expertly as a man spotting a pretty girl in a bar. Badly run though the Casa de Flores was, she could not imagine them turning over the room key of two women to a strange man—but Astrid, visibly chatting with Jenny at the counter and then leaving the lobby with them, would be convincing. Plus the fact that she looked no more harmful than a ray of sunlight.