In Cold Pursuit

by Ursula Curtiss

  “You thought she was too far gone to describe you after you turned her away from your door, didn’t you?” said the man facing her. “Oh, but she wasn’t. She told me about the wagon-wheel in your gate, where she nearly fell down, and your blonde hair—” mincingly, terrifyingly, the silhouetted fingers flickered about his head, and he could never have thought that up by himself, he was copying a woman’s gesture “—and the light you turned out in her face. Do you know how long she ran, bleeding?”

  Mary’s stomach turned over with foreknowledge. The subdued lights in the living room when she got back. Jenny’s shower cap, pale yellow, frilly, looking like hair to a desperate woman outside in the dark. Jenny’s almost pathological squeamishness at the sight of blood, her anxiety to see a newspaper the next morning, her momentary terror when a strange woman had stalked toward her with apparent intention at the Casa de Flores. Like someone washed free of blood, and coming back to make her pay?

  But Jenny lay in the back seat, unable to protect herself.

  “All right, I was frightened,” said Mary, trying in her horror to follow what must have been sleeping Jenny’s course. “There had been some break-ins in my neighborhood, with violence, and I didn’t dare open the door. And then I heard an ambulance a few minutes later, and I was sure that whoever it was had been rescued. In fact, I heard two sirens, so I—”

  Swiftly, without warning, her throat was encircled. It might almost have been a lover’s caress, except for the hovering thumbs. “Beg me,” said the man pleasantly.

  Mary’s throat closed on an obedient Please. This was what he wanted, this was to be the aperitif, this was why she had been spared in the corridor on that first evening when the door at the far end had opened and those watchful eyes looked out. And if she had gone with him on that purported shopping errand? She hadn’t been seen leaving with him, so that no one, later, could have said how she had come to be dead, strangled, in an abandoned adobe building.

  Except that someone in the restaurant or the bar might have remembered her with Daniel Brennan, and the woman in the rain hat, if she were still here at the time, would come forward. And as a witness— but Mary didn’t see how he could leave her to be a witness—Jenny would be no good at all.

  “I told Daniel Brennan you’d taken Jenny out to dinner,” said Mary, finding a level for her voice although the thumbs had come down lightly, testingly, prolongingly—and, oh, God, why hadn’t she? “If anything happens to me, after what happened to her, they’ll look for you.”

  And what satisfaction in that, when she was dead and a certain number of people sent flowers and went to her grave, saying soberly among themselves that at least the police had her killer? Who might, in view of his wife’s fate, get a reasonably light term. Uttering bad checks in New Mexico was a matter of extreme gravity; murder was frequently lesser.

  Although the car was not designed for kicking, Mary tried it wildly, and was rewarded by a further pressure on her neck. She and Jenny wouldn’t be here with this deadly presence if she had had the wit to analyze what he had given as an explanation for his anxiety while he waited for her in the shadows outside her room: “I couldn’t find your car anywhere.”

  But at no time had he seen her in it, so he couldn’t have identified it unless he had followed it from Santa Fe in his blue one, and disabled it to insure her presence in Juarez through tonight.

  “How does it feel now?” asked St. Ives curiously, leaning back from the desperately reaching hands that felt attached to arms of cotton. “How do you like it, Mary Vaughan?”

  The pain in her lungs, the outrage from her heart, were intolerable. At the moment he didn’t really care what happened to him, thought Mary dimmingly; he was obsessed. Her brain seemed to flicker like a light bulb about to fail, and there was an eruption from the back seat and the terrible grip loosened and then fell away from her throat.

  Jenny, swimming, tennis-playing Jenny, had an arm tight around the neck of the man in front of her, her wrist locked in her other hand, so that his head was tilted sharply back. She was crying in a broken and frantic way, as if she had been bottling up sobs for minutes, but she managed to say, “Oh, run, quick!”

  And leave Jenny here with him, now that she had turned from simple cargo into a witness? She had to. To run, screaming, was the only hope for them both, because St. Ives had commenced a grim thrashing. How many more seconds could Jenny hold on, wiry though she was?

  Still gasping, her throat feeling lined with briars, Mary stumbled out into the road, nearly fell, steadied herself in dimness; in order to see what he was doing, in this dark deserted place, St. Ives had left his parking lights on.

  They snapped off as Mary began to run. He might be—he had to be—still imprisoned in that armlock, but he had remembered that. She screamed, frightening herself further, thinking with despair that it was like lighting a match in a vast black cellar, and a pair of cars came careening around the corner. The second one was a police car, its roof-light wheeling furiously.

  Daniel Brennan whipped his door open and caught Mary as she staggered against his fender. His headlights were on full, and they reflected off two dull red star-shapes down the road. She gasped, “Jenny,” pointing, and without a word he raced toward them. Two brown-uniformed policemen pelted after him, shouting in Spanish; one of them drew his gun.

  Oh, God, they’ll shoot him, thought Mary drearily. The road came up to meet her, but so gradually that it didn’t even hurt.

  At the police station, there was a buzz of excitement when, along with Brennan and St. Ives, Mary and Jenny gave their names and their address in Juarez. A fast order was issued, and a man departed at speed. Mary did not risk a glance at Brennan, because the police did not appear particularly friendly, but heard him give a small recognizing cough.

  He had already paid severe fines for speeding and running a red light in the course of following St. Ives’ car with its glowing stars. When stopped, and in the erroneous belief that Mary was somehow compulsively in the company of the drug-planter, he had managed to convince the police that there was someone in danger in the car he was pursuing. St. Ives had surprised him with that sudden unsignalled turn, and with the pattern of one-way streets and the police on his tail, he had had to go around two blocks.

  St. Ives was handcuffed because he had resisted the police, but in spite of that, to Mary, he did not look particularly safe. Now that he no longer had to maintain a pose, the very cast of his features had altered, and it seemed impossible that he had ever smiled at her, speculated lightly on the invisible man at the Casa de Flores, given her what he had discovered as they drove—to divert her attention as he prepared to swing away from the hospital? His eyes were terrifying.

  Although her tongue slipped and slurred occasionally, Jenny was shakily sober. She had told Mary and Daniel Brennan on the way to the police station in his car, closely shepherded by the police with St. Ives, that her whiskey sour before dinner had tasted bitter, but she didn’t know what to expect of a whiskey sour and she had drunk it. Yes, she had been away from the table once when St. Ives told her smilingly that she had a smudge on her cheek, although, when she got to the ladies’ room, she hadn’t.

  It was the pain from the bump to her head upon being bundled into the car—intentional, it might be supposed, as further insurance that she stay incapacitated—which had begun to penetrate the fog of a double dose of tranquilizers with unaccustomed alcohol on top. She had heard the mention of a hospital, which had spurred the wakening process, and then the frightful accusation leveled against Mary.

  Now, under the bald lights and the suspicious stares of the police because she still gave off an aroma of brandy, Jenny said across the room to St. Ives, “It wasn’t Mary, it was me,” and, as he gave a contemptuous stir, “I had a yellow shower cap on.”

  The police gazes narrowed with incredulity and tennis-match attention. They were allowing this, Mary was sure, because they were waiting for the report on the luggage searched at Jaime’s Hotel
.

  “I thought it was a man—she had such short hair and she was wearing a man’s shirt, and I really couldn’t see her face because—” Jenny ducked her head, shying away from that, raised it again with courage. “I thought that whoever could beat up a man so badly might be coming after him, trying to get into the house too, and I was all alone and I—”

  She didn’t finish that, probably couldn’t finish it even to herself for a long time. But, Mary realized with astonishment and admiration, in spite of what must have been her extreme shock when St. Ives changed character before her eyes, she was being deliberately elliptical for the police. She was pointing a way, so that they mightn’t all be detained here forever.

  “I did think,” said Jenny steadily to the man she had fallen at least a little in love with, “that everything was all right when I heard an ambulance just a few minutes later.”

  The effect on St. Ives was peculiar. Mary saw the moment when he believed her—and looked bitter and dispossessed, like a man who had had something precious snatched away from him. It wasn’t grief; it had nothing to do with grief. Was that why any compassion she felt for him was purely in the abstract? Because he had said “my wife” in the same tone he might have used to refer to his horse, or his car? He had been bereft, she couldn’t doubt that, but a part of that had been personal outrage.

  The desk telephone rang, and the officer in charge answered it. He listened briefly, his dark gaze on Jenny and then on Mary, before he hung up; it might have been her imagination that made him look disappointed.

  “So,” he said, contemplating them all, and it was clear that he didn’t know quite what to do with them, appetizing though they were. Daniel Brennan had paid his fines. St. Ives had resisted, but without sufficient violence. In that deserted area, the peace hadn’t been disturbed. Olfactory evidence to the contrary, Jenny was sober. It was true that a police car had been diverted on what proved to be an unnecessary errand, but that happened all the time.

  He fixed his stare on Mary, who sat with her raincoat collar turned up around her throat—but that wasn’t remarkable, because from time to time she shivered, although he himself found the room quite warm. “You will wish to press charges?”

  It was from her door, out of halfway comprehensible motives and a decision neither weighed nor studied, that a woman in need of help had been turned away. “No,” said Mary. “We had an argument, as I told you, but it was all a misunderstanding.”

  She looked at St. Ives as she spoke, and saw that hatred, like love, was not so easily dispelled. He must have lived with his loathing like a new marriage bond for forty-eight hours, and along came a bony eighteen-year-old from the East, breaking it. Would he have a carry-over, a stubborn belief that she was still somehow involved?

  She stood up. “May we go now . . . ?

  She assumed that the police would escort the man she had known as Owen St. Ives back to his car, and that he would then turn it over to the place he had rented it from and resume his own blue car and get out of here; she didn’t care. She waited with Jenny while Brennan went to get his, aware of an occasional curious glance from the few passers-by at the sight of two Anglo women outside the police station at this hour, not caring about that either.

  In the bluish glow, Jenny dragged her hair over her shoulder and studied the ends fiercely. “I did see Brian at the market this afternoon. I lied to you about that.”

  “I know. I also—” began Mary, and stopped. Why pile pain upon pain? Jenny had saved them both, and been deceived, appallingly in the second case, by two men in a row. She would have quite enough to live with apart from the knowledge that Brian Beardsley had done his best to get her interred in a Mexican prison. Later, if it became necessary—but not now, when Jenny had taken such a physical and mental beating.

  Brennan came back with his car, and held the door while Jenny wobbled into the back. He didn’t immediately hand Mary in. He said curiously, “Did you mind a great deal, about St. Ives?”

  How noticing he was, when he had only observed them together at the police station. And had she minded, apart from that instinctive recoil in the car, as though she had received a lash? The haunting look of Spence—but something had made her back off from Spence at the last minute; not that there was a murderous bone in his body, but he hadn’t been for her.

  “No,” said Mary, and Brennan took her hand contentedly. “You can’t go anywhere, because of your car. You’ll be here in the morning.”

  “Yes, I will.” Whether it was fatigue or something else, Mary felt suddenly shy with him, as though they were meeting for the first time on this chilly dark alien street. And, in effect, they would be starting all over again. “I haven’t even thanked you yet, Daniel.” It tasted new on her tongue, and adventurous.

  “We have, I hope, all the time in the world,” said Brennan.

  The man whose real name turned out to be Wesley Hale did not have a carry-over of any kind. At some time before dawn, his northbound car crossed the median and flipped over, killing him instantly. Tragically, said the short newspaper account, he was to have attended the funeral later in the day of his wife, Charlotte, a recent murder victim. (See related story.) As there was no alcohol involved, it was the official surmise that he had fallen asleep at the wheel.

  But of course the police had not seen his robbed and furious eyes.

  Jenny had had an abrupt longing for her parents, and went home with a gained weight of a pound and a half, which was like a cautious climb up an icy hill. Mary did not send her the clipping.

  She did forward an item spotted by Daniel in a financial journal: “The fight for control of Payne-Howard, the nation’s second-largest manufacturer of burglar alarms and fire-warning systems, has ended with the confirming of Hiram Aufderheide, 60, as president. Allegations of instability had been brought against Aufderheide, who two weeks ago was incommunicado in Mexi—Please turn to Page 14, Col. 5.”