Extra Kill - Dell Shannon (17 page)

At ten-thirty on a gray February morning it wasn't
much to see: shabby refaced buildings, haphazard stalls cheek-by-jowl
in a row down the middle, over the old gutter, and most of the shops
shut, boards up in the stall windows. Night was its time, when the
lights softened down the shabbiness and the tourists came, the buyers
(tourists or not), and the famous old restaurant was open midway down
the street, and the women who'd marketed and cooked and chatted all
day in their ready-made cotton housedresses got out their shawls and
combs. There'd be a couple of men with guitars stationed somewhere,
and the man at the mouth of the street with his little bags of hot
roasted piñon nuts, and the music and laughter drifting out of La
Golondrina, the restaurant, and the buyers drifting along looking at
everything (the women stumbling on the uneven bricks, in their high
heels)—at the gimcrack cheap jewelry and the beautiful handcrafted
real stud from the little silversmithies here and south of the
border, at the handmade baskets, and braided-leather and
to0led—leather shoes, at the hand-blown glass and the hand—woven
cotton (also at the boxed cheap linens from Belgium, and the good
stud and the bad from Japan, from the Philippines, from everywhere in
Europe)—and maybe stopping to have their fortunes told by the old
woman at the far end of the street.

And even at ten-thirty in the morning, over the whole
street there hung the faint scent of glamour—and that was the
combined scents from the little cavelike shop, three breakneck steps
down from street level, where the candles were made, the incredible
rainbow candles scented with pine, with orange, with jasmine and
gardenia, and nameless musky saccharine odors.

Most of the shops were shut, but he knew that behind
many of them were living quarters. This was a minor little errand, he
needn't have come himself, but—he also knew—he might have a
better chance of getting whatever there was to get than the most
fluent of his Spanish-speaking sergeants.

He could have wished that the article in question had
been something other than a serape. That inimitable object of
Mexicana, the long strip of rough cactus cloth or cotton, garishly
striped and fringed, was to be had at all but a few specialty shops:
but maybe that fact was balanced by another, that it had been raining
that night.

He started at the mouth of the street and took one
side at a time. Not every shop had quarters attached; not everyone
was at home. Everyone who was was anxious to be helpful but
remembered nothing of any use to him .... To be sure, most places had
remained open that rainy evening. When one was under shelter, and it
was the regular time for business, why not? There was always a chance
that the rain would slacken, that a few people who had decided to
come to the street would not be put off by the weather. And so it had
been: business had been very poor, of course, but a few buyers had
come—chiefly people who had reservations at the restaurant and
visited the shops afterward. But many places had closed earlier than
usual, ten or ten-thirty. Not all, no. Wine was pressed on him. In
one place a very old woman looked on him in contempt and called him a
police spy. In the place next door a pretty high-school-age girl
asked him please would he talk to her brother and tell him he was
crazy: "See, Joe keeps saying he's got nine counts on him to
start, being Mexican—what's the use of trying to get educated and
so on, he'd never get anywhere, might as well get things however you
can. He's in with some real bad fellows, Mama and I get worried-and
if you'd just show him—" He took the name and address for
Taylor in Juvenile; Taylor would see one of the youth counselors
contacted Joe and did what he could .... By the time he got to the
mouth of the street again, having worked his way right up one side
and down the other, Mendoza, who was not a wine drinker, was feeling
slightly bilious and disgruntled at this waste of time.

But there, in the end shop—scarcely more than an
alcove, now, shut off from the street by a large board, with a single
room behind it—he found Manuel Perez, improving the out-of-business
hour by making up his accounts. Mr. Perez removed his horn-rimmed
glasses, listened gravely to Mendoza's questions, and said at once
that he remembered the occasion very well indeed.

"At last I arrive," said Mendoza. "Now
why didn't I start here? Tell me."

It seemed that Mr. Perez had kept his shop open later
than any other that rainy night, not in the hope of customers but
because he was waiting for his son, who had borrowed the family car
to take his girl to a school dance.
La familia
Perez
lived a couple of miles away from the
street, and especially on a cold wet night Mr. Perez had not fancied
the walk home. The dance was to be over at midnight, and Diego, who
was a good reliable boy, would then deliver his girl home and come to
pick up his father at the shop: which in fact he had done, somewhere
around twelve-thirty.

Meanwhile Mr. Perez had spent a quiet evening sitting
in his shop, waiting on the few customers who came. "And you
comprehend, later on it's pleasant sitting there alone—a few other
shopkeepers who don't live here, they called out goodnight as they
left—the Garcias two doors up stayed open late, and Mrs. Sanchez
across the way too, it's anything to make a dollar with that one—but
the lights go out, one by one, and presently I'm the only one left
open, and all is quiet but for the rain, splat-splat-splat, outside
.... I took the opportunity to write a letter to my brother in
Fresno, and later on I read my book—I always keep a book here for
the slow times, I'm a great reader and at home with the children it's
noisy .... " And just about midnight, as Mr. Perez sat reading
in his little lonely circle of light, a woman's voice spoke to him
from the street.

Startled, he had looked up, and there she was outside
the perimeter of light, no more than a dark figure. His glasses were
for reading distance and in his surprise he hadn't taken them off, so
he could give only a vague description. She spoke hurriedly and with
a strange foreign accent on her English; she said she wanted
something to protect her hat from the rain; one of his serapes would
do, how much were they? The whole, queer little transaction happened
so quickly that it was not until she was gone that Mr. Perez told
himself it was surely odd, when she wanted to save her hat from the
rain, that she had not naturally stepped over the threshold into the
shop .... "But no, she stays outside, she is really only a hand
and arm reaching into the light, you understand?"

On hearing the price, two dollars, she held out the
money, said any one would do, and he took it over to her. But she had
forgotten the tax, the eight cents for the state, and when he
reminded her she had impatiently handed him another dollar bill,
said, "That's all right, don't bother about change,” and
walked away rapidly. This Mr. Perez had not liked, because he was an
honest man and also had his pride, and he did not like to accept tips
like a waiter; however, she was gone—"and money is money.”

"That is very true. Was she carrying anything?"

Yes, she had had a suitcase; this she had set down a
little in front of her to open her purse, and Mr. Perez had seen it a
trifle more clearly than the lady. It had been an old brown leather
suitcase. And the purse she was carrying, it had glistened as she
opened it, catching the reflection of light from the shop—he
thought it might have been of that shiny plastic, or perhaps patent
leather, a dark color.

"And her hand—you saw her sleeve and hand?"
Mendoza thought of Cara Kingman's silver-enameled fingernails.

Yes, so Mr. Perez had. A light-colored sleeve, of a
coat he thought, but could not say whether a long or short coat—and
it had a dark cuff, like velvet. As for the hand, the lady had been
wearing gloves.

"Of what sort?" asked Mendoza.

"One small thing I can tell you about that,"
said Mr. Perez. "You comprehend, her hand is closer to me, and
partly in the light, so I have a better look—for just that one
small moment. She handed the money to me between her fingers, and
then when I spoke of the tax, she reached into her purse
again—impatient, you know—and held the third bill out on her
palm, like so. Her gloves were a very light tan color, like raw
leather—I don't know if they were leather or cloth—but they had
buttons on the inside of the wrist, and when she held her hand out
so, I saw that on that glove—her left hand it would be—the little
button was missing."

A small amber—colored button in the loose earth
raked over the corpse. "
Diez millén
demonios negros desde infierno!
" said
Mendoza.

"This does not, I fear," said Mr. Perez
sympathetically, "please you to hear for some reason."

"On the contrary, it
is very helpful indeed. But at the moment I don't know what it
means—except that I have been wrong somewhere—or exactly what to
do with it .... "

* * *

Hackett's older sister had a couple of kids, and when
they were smaller, a few years ago, once in a while he'd got roped in
to sit with them, read to them. There was a thing the little girl had
been crazy about, The Wizard of Oz; he'd read out of that one a good
deal, and right now something in it came back to him. The way one of
the wicked witches had just disappeared when she died—nothing left
at all, because all there'd been to her was a kind of shell of
malice.

He wouldn't, some odd superstitious way, be at all
surprised if the same thing happened to Mona Ferne before his eyes.
Maybe Mr. Horwitz took a jaundiced general view, but he'd been so
right about this one. The front, and that was absolutely all . . .

"Such a terrible thing, I can't bear to think of
it," she said in her light, sweet voice. "Poor darling
Brooke. He did have talent, you know, he'd have done great things,
I'm convinced—it's a tragedy for that reason as well as for all his
friends."

"Yes, of course," said Hackett. "When
did you see Mr. Twelvetrees last, Miss Ferne?"

She sat in the same chair her daughter had slouched
in yesterday, but easily upright, graceful: everything about her was
finished to a high gloss, from the lacquered flaxen coiffure to the
fragile patent leather sandals with their stilt heels. Ten feet away,
she looked an attractive thirty-five; any closer, no. All artificial:
the smallest gesture, the tinkling laugh, the expression, the whole
woman a planned thing into which God knew what minute calculations
had gone. He didn't know much about such things, but he could guess
at all the desperate, tedious, grim effort put forth—over the years
more and more—on the front: the important thing. The massage, the
cosmetics, the diets, the plastic surgery, the money spent and the
time used, so much time that she'd had none left over for anything
else at all, and so everything else about her had shriveled and died,
and she was an empty shell posturing and talking there. All to
preserve the illusion that was no illusion, closer than across a
room. Any nearer, you saw the lines and the hollows, the little scars
at the temples and in front of the ears, the depth of the skillful
cosmetic mask, the little loose fold of skin at the throat, and the
veins standing up on the backs of the narrow hands with their long
enameled nails, their flashing rings, and the expensively capped
front teeth, and the faint blistering round the eyelids from strain
because she ought to wear glasses.

Those carefully made-up brown eyes widened on him.
"Heavens, Sergeant, you can't think I had anything to do with-?
No, no, I see you must ask everyone, mustn't you? Well, now, let me
see—I believe it must have been that Thursday, the twenty-ninth it
would be. Yes. Brooke dropped by and asked me to go to dinner with
him, but I had an engagement already .... I never could bring myself
to believe it was so, what dear Martin thought—Brooke would
never—I've been quite upset about it, but then all of us who knew
him—and now to have this terrible thing happen! I've hardly taken
it in yet, but I'll try to
help you however I
can—"

"Yes, thank you." This house, Hackett
thought-something haunted about this house, with that great tree
brooding over it, the rooms like caves until you turned on a light.
But this wasn't the ghost who haunted it: the ghost was the other one
.... She had let him in—looking like hell again, today in an
old-womanish gray cotton dress, ugly clumping shoes, her sullen face
naked without cosmetics in the daylight from the door. Yet that clear
pale skin—looking at her there, he suddenly saw that her eyes were
beautiful, her good hazel-brown eyes clear as brook water, framed in
heavy lashes. It was an oddly disturbing discovery, and almost
immediately he'd made another which disturbed him even more.

And that wasn't his kind of thing, either—the
intuitive understanding of emotional secrets. He was a cop, not a
psychologist; his business, and one he was pretty good at, was
collecting facts and fitting them together to make a picture. Mendoza
was the one with the crystal ball. .. . .

It was the way she did it, the tone of her flat
voice—turning to call up the stairs, "Mother!" All of a
sudden he knew about this Angel Carstairs .... You'd think she could
do something, Mr. Horwitz said. I'm twenty-six years old and, . . .
But she was doing something: the same thing she'd been doing,
probably, most of her life. She was punishing Mona—for being her
mother, for being what she was. And so anything Mona was or did or
said, she had to go the opposite way—just to annoy. It was the
negative approach, and also a trap she'd got caught in; because now
for such a long while this had been the one reason for Angel
Carstairs' existence, she couldn't stop and turn another way and go
out to find life away from Mona. Maybe she understood that, maybe she
didn't; either way she lived in a little hell she'd made herself,
because every way she tormented Mona (reminding her with every
mocking Mother of their ages, making herself the graceless ugly
duckling in mute rebellion against the creed that beauty was the sole
importance), she was tormenting herself too.