Puzzle for Pilgrims (22 page)

But there was a difference. Marietta had accepted the inevitable. But there was still fight in Iris.

She came to me, “Peter, it’s true?”

“It’s true.”

“But how? I don’t believe it.”

“A sleeping pill. Somehow he got poison. I saw him give it to Jake. There’s no doubt,” I said. “We’d better get him now.”

“And…?”

“I don’t know. We’ll have to think. I want you all to see him—Jake. I can’t do this alone now. We’ve all got to face it and decide.”

I took them down the corridor. The night was trailing off into morning and yet the hotel still seemed empty. There was no feeling of people asleep behind the closed doors. They were all out in the streets still dancing through the soiled streamers, sneaking that last tequila, kidding themselves they were still young and beautiful.

Martin was waiting for us—fully dressed, very quiet. He seemed completely unaware of Iris and Marietta. He had eyes only for me. I said they were to come with me to Jake’s room. He said nothing. They just trooped after me. I unlocked the door. They followed me in. I shut the door and put up the chain.

Jake was sprawled on the carpet. With Marietta and Iris in the room, the nakedness of the body, in its brief jockey shorts, was flagrantly noticeable. It made him human again, not just a carcass—human and dead.

Marietta’s eyes moved past the bed to the ash tray and the scarlet-stained butts. She was remembering what had happened there… so short a time ago… between Jake and her. I wondered what horrors were in her mind. Iris had taken Martin’s hand. He didn’t draw it away, but he didn’t react to her either. Marietta sat down on the bed, her back turned toward Jake. She lit a cigarette with a sharp spurt from the match. None of them said anything. The atmosphere of the room was heavy and clotted as buttermilk. They were leaving it all to me again.

I said to Martin, “I don’t know when you got the poison. But I saw you give him the pill. It’s no use pretending. It’s no use bawling you out either. It’s done. I said it needn’t have happened, however you felt about him. And I say it again. I could have coped with Jake. He could have been frightened away.”

Iris said, “If only we’d told you, Martin. Peter and I realized it tonight. Jake killed Sally. He killed her so he could exploit us. He…”

Martin didn’t say anything. He didn’t even seem to be listening. He was looking at Jake, looking down with his blue, childlike gaze, studying him as if a corpse was something new and strange, something to be observed.

It was Marietta who broke the silence. She didn’t turn to us. But her back had dropped and her voice was somehow appalling.

She said, “That isn’t true.”

Iris and I turned.

I said, “What isn’t true, Marietta?”

“Jake didn’t kill Sally.”

I felt a tingle in my skin. I saw the whole pattern beginning to change shape and I could hardly face having to listen to what she was going to say. I had made myself believe that the first murder had been something beyond our responsibility, something brutal that had come from Jake. It had been easier to accept, with Jake as a murderer who had finally been killed by Martin. That way the whole saga was at its least ugly.

I said, “Then who killed Sally, Marietta?”

For a moment, she didn’t speak. The dark hair that hid her face from me was lusterless, dead hair.

She said, “Iris, when you arrived at Sally’s, she was dead, wasn’t she?” Iris nodded, pale, not speaking.

Marietta went on, “She was alive when I left her. There’s only that one entrance. You can’t get in any other way. When I left Sally, she told me Martin was coming. I was worried for Martin. You wondered where I was all the time after I left her, before you found me in Paco’s. I was waiting down the little dark alley by the church, waiting where I could see the door to Sally’s house.”

She paused.

“I saw Martin come. I saw Martin go. If Jake had come after, I would have seen him. He didn’t. No one came before Iris, and when Iris arrived Sally was dead. So you see…”

“No.” Iris took a step toward her. “Marietta, no.”

“Yes.” Weariness was like a yoke on Marietta’s shoulders, pressing them down. “Martin killed Sally. I’ve always known it. From the beginning I’ve known it.”

She got up then. Slowly she moved to her brother. He stood watching her.

“They’ve got to know, Martin,” she said, “It’s gone too far. They’ve got to know now.”

Martin with his golden hair, his destructive boy’s simplicity, Marietta, dark, doomed like Alcestis through the thing she loved.

She put her hand on her brother’s arm. “Tonight you accused me of killing Sally. You did that—when you knew it was you. But don’t worry. I don’t mind, Martin. You can’t ever do anything to me that I would mind.”

She paused. “And there’s nothing to be afraid of, because it’ll be all right for you. I’ll take the blame. That way’s better for me anyhow.”

“No, Marietta,” I said.

She was still looking at Martin. “That way’s better for me. It’s the way I want it to be.”

The words were bleak, final.

I had a vision of a dark little girl throwing herself down to “die” in the cowslips while a golden little boy plowed upward with his hawthorn staff, singing…

I couldn’t let it happen that way. I knew it was useless to argue with Marietta. She was set on her path as relentlessly as a compass points to the north. I turned to Martin. I said, “You can’t let her take the blame.”

He looked back at me. His cornflower eyes seemed to be hiding nothing.

“But I didn’t do it, Peter.”

That probably wasn’t a lie. By now he had probably made himself believe it. Martin was capable of that. Martin could kill Sally and lock the memory away in the deepest recess of his mind. Martin only believed what he wanted to believe.

I said, “I’ll have to call a doctor now. A doctor will call the police. Do you want them to arrest Marietta?”

He dropped his gaze from mine as if he realized that their blue candor was not working its usual charm. “But I didn’t kill Sally. I didn’t kill Jake.”

Marietta said, soothingly, like a mother, “It’s all right, Martin. It’ll be all right.”

In anger and despair, I said, “You’re not to do this, Marietta. I won’t let you.”

She lifted her green gaze to me. It was as if I were a stranger on the street, stopping her and saying, “Excuse me, Madam, but I won’t let you breathe.” There was an exalted expression to her face, a strange kind of excitement. I realized suddenly that she was enjoying this insane opportunity for sacrifice. Had the martyrs enjoyed their martyrdom that way, I wondered? Thrilling to the flash of the infidel’s knife and the touch of the flaming brand to the fagot? The mystery of her was different now—terrible, almost unclean.

Iris said, “The lawyer Jake knew in Taxco, he’ll send Jake’s report to the police, won’t he?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And it’ll all come out about Sally—that she was murdered?”

“Yes.”

Quietly she said, “Perhaps they need never know the truth.”

I turned to her. I could hardly believe she’d said that. I was too confused to see how anyone could find a way out—however unlikely.

Iris was steady. The idea, whatever it was, had brought her assurance. She said, “We can say Jake killed Sally. We were Sally’s friends. We found out about it. We called his bluff. He knew the game was up. He committed suicide.”

Martin and Marietta were out of the picture now. It was only Iris and I. I felt a twinge of hope. Iris’s way, it would be playing Jake’s game back at him.

I said, “It might work.”

“You think so?”

Even now Martin was winning, of course. We were all certain he had killed Sally and Jake, but none of us had even considered exposing him to the police. We had moved that far under the Haven spell.

I said, “We’d have to persuade the Taxco police that his report of Sally’s death was a lie, something to put the blame on us.”

“I know.” Some of the light faded from her face. She was thinking, as I was, of the detail, realizing how risky such a plan would be. “There’s Sally’s letter too. Written on her typewriter. Accusing Martin, Marietta, me.”

“Yes.”

“Where is it? Did he send it to the lawyer?”

“No. He said he didn’t.”

“Then…”

Iris glanced around the room. So did I. I saw Jake’s gabardine jacket, where he had flung it, on a chair. I went to it. I felt in the breast pocket. There was a bunch of papers. I pulled them out.

A steamship ticket folder, a letter stamped for mailing, a folded sheet of paper, and an envelope containing prints and negatives.

I unfolded the paper. I saw typewritten words. They began:

“
Dear Mr. Johnson
: I’ve tried to call you all day but…”

Relief shivered through me. There it was, exactly as Jake had read it out loud to us, Sally’s jerky, neurotic cry of danger to her lawyer.

I said, “It’s here, Iris.”

She hurried to me. She read it over my elbow. “Destroy it.”

With Jake dead, there was no one to tell about the overturned vase, the slipper, the broken balustrade. This was the only evidence. I went to the bathroom. I held the half-finished letter over the toilet. I set a match to it. I watched it curl up toward my fingers. I dropped it, black and flaky, into the water. The photographs and the negatives were Jake’s two pictures of Sally’s living room. I burned them too and flushed the hopper.

Somehow I felt as if I was killing Sally a second time. This was all that was left of her. Now there was no voice to accuse from the grave.

I still held the other papers in my hand. I went back into the bedroom. Marietta and Martin were together by the window. They weren’t even watching. Iris came to me.

I looked at the steamship folder. I pulled the inside paper out. It was a ticket. A single ticket on an Argentine boat sailing the next evening for Buenos Aires.

“The Argentine freighter,” breathed Iris. “We saw it in the harbor.”

And I realized then that Jake had been a small-time crook after all. He’d been bluffing us when he’d said he was going to stay on. He hadn’t had the guts to go on with his game, gradually milking the whole fortune out of Martin. He had been afraid of the situation—and us. He had planned a quick getaway after the first payment. That’s why he had brought us to Veracruz—to be near his port of escape.

The killing of him seemed even more futile now. Tomorrow, without our lifting a little finger, he would have been gone.

The whole episode would have been over for fifty thousand of Sally’s two million dollars.

Just fifty thousand dollars. Money.

I looked at the letter then. It was stamped, but the flap was not stuck down. It was addressed to a Señor Gomez in Taxco. I took the letter out. It was typed in Spanish. I studied it with my threadbare knowledge of the language and suddenly, with a quiver of excitement, I understood it.

It said that Jake was leaving for Buenos Aires. It said that he had left the report for the police with Señor Gomez only for his own protection. Once he was on the boat he no longer needed the protection. He was going to mail this letter from the boat, he said. When Señor Gomez received it, he was to destroy the report immediately and forget all about it. It was signed by Jake in pen.

It was the natural step for him to have taken, of course. Once he was safe with his fifty thousand dollars, he wouldn’t want a murder investigation to flare up around Sally. Not for our sakes. He didn’t give a damn for us. But for his own sake. He had been hopelessly tangled in the affair himself. There would be an inevitable kickback on him.

Even so, as I gazed at those flowing Spanish sentences, this seemed like a preposterously charitable gesture of Fate.

Iris had been reading it too. “Peter, is it…?”

“Yes. When Mr. Gomez gets this, he destroys the report.”

“Then we mail it.” Iris’s face was shining. “And no one will ever know about Sally?”

“No one will ever know about Sally.”

There was something to work with now. I felt steady, almost calm. I turned and looked down at the heavy, inert body on the floor. Jake had been poisoned. I knew that. But, to a lay eye, there was nothing about his appearance that glaringly suggested poison. He might almost have died from a heart attack. Big men notoriously had a tendency toward heart trouble. I thought of the carnival. For five days Veracruz had tossed the plodding caution of everyday to the winds. Life was keyed up to accept the extraordinary as the ordinary. Even the policemen, directing the traffic, had been wound in streamers, laughing, joking, part of the annual madness.

A Mexican doctor, coming late at night, through the carnival streets, to attend an American tourist who had died of a heart attack.

Iris said softly,” You’re going to mail it, Peter?”

“I’m going to mail it. I’m going down to the lobby right now. I’ll mail it and ask the night clerk for an English speaking doctor.”

“A doctor? And…”

I turned to her. “I’ll tell him my friend had a heart attack. That he’d had them before.”

Her lips were pale. “You think…?”

“It might work. Of course, if he’s suspicious, if he wants an autopsy, it’ll be hopeless.”

“And if he does want an autopsy?”

“My friend had financial difficulties. He was morose, neurotic. I’d brought him to the carnival to try to snap him out of it.”

She whispered, “And he committed suicide.”

“And he committed suicide.”

“Peter.”

“It’s the only way.”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s the only way.”

We were doing what I’d always known we would do, fixing things for the Havens.

I looked at Martin and Marietta, standing together at the window. I said, “Get them out of here, Iris. Clear the lipstick-stained butts away, anything that points to people except Jake being here. Then all three of you go to your room. Don’t let them talk to anyone. You’re out of it now. I’m on my own.”

She said impulsively, “Don’t you think I’d better come with you?”

In the past, when we’d been in love, she had always insisted on taking her share of any unpleasant responsibility. This unconscious throwback, coming at this of all times, gave me a pang.