Puzzle for Pilgrims (25 page)

My voice sounding strangely unfamiliar, I said, “Martin got that bottle of sleeping pills from Sally. I remember. He told me back in Taxco. He had come up to see her from Acapulco. He hadn’t expected to spend the night. He hadn’t brought his own. And Sally gave him the bottle. She said he’d left it there. The bottle came from Sally.”

“Sally?”

“Why did Sally change her mind suddenly? Why did she call you and me and Martin telling us to come to her house at certain definite times? The night before, she had been with me. She had been implacable, eaten up with spite. She had sworn she would never give a divorce, that she would make you all squirm if it was the last thing she did. Why, overnight, did she become sweetness and light?”

A look of half comprehension had come into Iris’s face.

I went on. “Martin said she was pleasant and reasonable with him, told him she would give the divorce. He said she was alive when he left. Why couldn’t he have been telling the truth? Martin said she particularly asked him to give her back the gold ring. Why? And why, if no one struggled with her, was the vase overturned, the slipper in the middle of the room? And why did she choose that of all crazy times, after she had made up with Martin, to begin the letter to Mr. Johnson saying she was afraid, that Martin was going to kill her?”

“Peter, you don’t think…?”

“When Martin left, Sally gave him the bottle of sleeping pills. And when you arrived, at the exact time she had specified, you found Martin’s ring lying on the balcony. Sally must have thrown it there. She was the only person. Why did she throw it there?”

Now that I knew, the whole saga seemed as relentless as a steam roller lumbering forward.

“Sally loved Martin—if you call it love. She told me he was the only man in the world she wanted. She was telling the truth. She loved him, and she hated him when she knew she couldn’t have him any longer. She hated Martin. She hated you for stealing him. She had always hated Marietta for being closer to him than she could ever be. It was a plan, don’t you see, a ruthless, worked-out plan, the sort of plan that could only have come from bitter, vicious malice. From Sally.”

I said, “She knew she’d lost Martin forever. Sally was smart. We’ve always said that. Sally was smart. She knew things. Once he’d left her with you, she knew she’d lost him and would never get him back. She was going to make you all pay. She said that over and over.
Pay.
She used all her weapons, the bracelet, everything. She went to Acapulco, threatened, and couldn’t make a dent. Martin was unthreatenable. He was through with her, and once he’s through a person doesn’t exist. That’s when she must have realized there was only one way to make Martin suffer. And by then her spite must have grown so deep into her that nothing else mattered. Life wasn’t worth living if she couldn’t get what she wanted, if she had to play the role of the poor little abandoned wife. So she started to make her plan. See, Iris?”

“I think so.”

“She hired Jake. That was the first thing. A private detective to protect her. It was an essential part of the plan. She gave Jake the bracelet and the pawn ticket, the evidence against Martin and Marietta for the original theft. She told Jake the whole story of Martin leaving her and dressed it up with fears that he, or one of you, wanted to murder her. Jake was told he’d been hired to protect her from murder. She built him into the perfect witness for the prosecution, when the prosecution should need a witness.

“After that, she came to Mexico City. She couldn’t resist going to Marietta and making her “pay” a bit, because Marietta isn’t like Martin. Marietta is vulnerable—through Martin. But Sally’s main object was to see me. I had lost my wife to Martin. I was the one person who should have been on her side. She came to me and told me the same story, that one of you was going to murder her. I was meant to be another witness for the prosecution. Only I didn’t play ball. She found I was an enemy, not an ally, so she turned on me, too, added me to her list of victims.”

As I spoke, Sally was vivid in my mind, the little heavy-haired blonde, the eyes burning with malice, the fragile body exuding danger.

“Everything was set then for the plan. She went home. She called Martin. She called you. She called me. She told us all the same story. Everything would be all right if only we came to see her. Each of us got a definite time. She wanted to be sure that we wouldn’t overlap, because the evening was carefully staged as a play with its exits and entrances known in advance. She summoned us all—to a trap.”

Iris didn’t speak. But I could see the horror, the disgust in her eyes.

I went on. “Marietta showed up. That was the one thing Sally hadn’t expected. But it didn’t interfere with the program, because she arrived early. Probably Sally was glad. She hadn’t thought of Marietta, but Marietta had fallen into the trap too. And, after Marietta had gone, the real thing began. Martin arrived. Sally was charming, sympathetic, forgiving. She had rehearsed it that way. All she needed from Martin was his presence, his departure, his ring. It ran smoothly. Martin wasn’t suspicious. Martin never bothers enough about other people to question their sincerity. He gave her the ring. She gave him the sleeping tablets. He left.”

“And after he’d gone,” whispered Iris,” before I was due to arrive…”

“Exactly. After he’d gone, she staged the scene. The slipper on the living-room floor. The overturned vase. A struggle. The ring on the balcony. To point that struggle to Martin. And then the letter. It was never meant for Mr. Johnson. She sat down and rattled it off, stopping before the end, trying to make it look as if she had been disturbed in the middle. It was, of course, just something else for the police. A written accusation left behind that Martin or you or Marietta had killed her. Then everything was set for the final act. The demented thing, the only thing she could do to achieve a real revenge on Martin. Maybe she’d saved one cyanide pill from the bottle of tablets. Probably she did, because she could never be sure that the fall would do its work. The timing was perfect. She knew you would arrive any minute. She took the pill out there on the balcony—and she threw herself over the balustrade down to the stream bed.”

I added softly, “Maybe you were the one she wanted arrested for the murder. Probably you were, because she’d thought out that other way of dealing with Martin. It looked flawless. You would arrive. You would find her dead. The police would come. There was all the evidence in the world in that house to show she had been murdered. And, even if you had been quick-witted enough to destroy it, Jake would appear. Jake, who had been told she had hired him to protect her from you three, Jake who had the bracelet and the pawn ticket, the proof of the theft. It must have seemed inevitable to her that she had made you all “pay” at last.

“There would have been an autopsy. The cyanide, if she took it, would have been the clinching evidence. You would all have been dragged through the courts, and whichever of you was finally convicted, she didn’t have to worry that Martin would get off, because she had, actually, killed him already. The cyanide capsules were there in the bottom of his bottle of sleeping pills. She knew he took them almost every day. It was only a question of time. Just luck that he hadn’t taken a poisoned one days ago—and died.”

Iris shivered. “And it would have happened that way—except for Jake. She didn’t figure Jake out right. She thought he was just a stupid hick detective who could be her stooge after she was dead. She didn’t realize he was a crook, a smart crook. He came to the house, looking for Marietta. He found the body. He thought one of us had murdered her, of course. But he saw how he could use it for his own advantage, so he ruined her plan, he took it over, he used it for himself.”

“Yes.”

“It happened that way, Peter. Of course it did.”

“It had to. Putting everything together, no one else could have killed Sally, no one else could have killed Jake.”

Looking back, it was terrifying to think there could have been that much warped, sadistic spite in one little woman. And yet, it was right. I thought of Sally at the bullfight, bright-eyed while the darts stabbed into the bull. The clue had been there for me from the beginning. The desire to destroy, the desire to be destroyed. Sally had reached the top of her hill all right and found there enough nightmare to satisfy even her.

I thought how her little ghost seemed to have been twittering always close to us through these last terrible weeks.
Really, Peter, it’s worth being dead for.
Ever since that night in Taxco, we had, without knowing it, been puppets dancing to her tug of the strings. She’d had her heart’s desire, even if it hadn’t come in the way she had expected. She’d done it. She’d made us “pay”.

The room was quiet. Even Veracruz outside seemed uncharacteristically subdued.

Close to me on the bed, Iris said, “How happy she’d be if she could see us now.”

Her voice brought me back. “At least we’re not dead.”

“No,” said Iris. “We’re not dead. We fooled her there.”

I picked up the bottle which held the capsules. We both looked at it with a sort of horror, as if we were looking at Sally.

Iris’s expression changed. A new dread came that seemed to have nothing to do with Sally.

“We’ll have to tell Martin.”

“I guess so.”

Her voice faltered. “And when he knows it wasn’t Marietta, he’ll know he won’t have to take the blame. He won’t leave for Argentina.”

“Maybe he won’t.”

Iris seemed to draw herself in, to become smaller. I knew what she was thinking, and pity for her clamped onto my heart like a cold hand.

“Peter, if he doesn’t go, it’ll all be the same again.” She looked up. Her eyes were haunted. “I haven’t got the strength to leave him. I’ll hang on, hoping, kidding myself, hating myself. It’ll go on and on…”

She broke off. Her hands clung to my arms fiercely.

“Please, Peter, let him go. Don’t tell him about Sally. Let him still think it was Marietta. Let him go.”

I hated looking at her. I put my arm around her and drew her close to me. Marietta had cried to me for help, and I had gone to her with all pennants flying. I was going to marry her. Now Iris was crying for help, and all I could do for her was that one small thing. Marietta had me as an anchor. The Havens always found an anchor. It would take months for Iris to find herself again, and there was no one for her—nothing.

If only she had broken down, it would have been easier.

“Don’t worry, baby,” I said. “Martin will go. I won’t tell him anything.”

I was back in my own room. I was afraid to stay with Iris. It hurt too much knowing I couldn’t comfort her. Sunlight sparkled crisply over the faded carpet. The weather was going to be fine for the last day of the carnival. I had been up all night and felt it. I loosened my tie and dropped into a chair. I took out a cigarette and faced what lay ahead.

The future strangely was Marietta. Sally, Martin, Iris, death, and danger were all in the past. Something new was to begin for me. I tried to recapture those moments, so long ago in memory though not in time, when I had held Marietta in my arms and reacted exultantly to her humble, half-sobbed request to marry her. Somehow the memory was blurred. I found I could not even reconstruct Marietta’s face in my mind. At some moment, there in Iris’s room, the image had slipped away. I felt obscurely nervous, almost embarrassed.

Some time later the door opened and Marietta came in. The instant I saw her she was alive again to me. She was wearing a green blouse and a white skirt. It is strange what a potent effect clothes have. She had been wearing those things on the night in Taxco when I had found her on Paco’s balcony with the garish firework lights bringing her profile in and out of illumination. And suddenly it was the same as it had been the other time. Her beauty intoxicated me. Beneath the shining rook-dark hair, her face was radiant as it had been that night when she had come to me with her sheaf of white stock.

“Peter.”

I had risen. She took my arms. Her hands slid up to my shoulders. She kissed me, and I could feel the excitement quivering in her. This was new and strange, wildly removed from the sad tenderness I had felt for Iris and which, a few moments before, had seemed so powerful. Strange and unreal as something you dream of happening when you’re alone on a dark, rainy night.

I said, “It’s okay with the doctor, Marietta. It’s all fixed up.”

“I know. I know. Martin told me.”

She was holding me tightly, but with the mention of Martin’s name some of the contact between us seemed to go. I felt a strange stirring of anxiety.

“You’ve seen Martin?”

“Yes.”

She moved in my arms so that she was looking up at me. The radiance was there in the green eyes, but something was marring it.

And I knew suddenly what it was. The radiance wasn’t for me.

I said, “He’s going away.”

“I know.”

“And Iris isn’t going with him.”

“No.”

Feeling tired and old, I said, “You’re going, too. That’s what you’ve come to tell me.”

The green eyes were still smiling, clear as the sunlight.

“He needs me.”

“Marietta, you’re mad. If you go, you’ll destroy yourself.”

She wasn’t listening. I saw now that she wasn’t the same person as that crushed, tormented girl who had bared her heart to me with the mercilessness of a Nazi surgeon. That had been Marietta down, out of favor with Martin. This was another Marietta—the Marietta whom Martin had summoned into the Presence, Marietta up.

I knew then that I had lost her already, if I’d ever had her. This was something beyond argument. And with the clarity of a drowning man, I assessed my love for her. I did love her. In a way that had practically no kinship with my love for Iris. I loved her as, perhaps, a fisherman in a folk legend loved a mermaid, with a love that was doomed never to reach an earthy fulfillment with breakfast cups and morning newspapers.

“Now he has the thing he did to Sally to remember, he needs me. He’s always going to need me.”

The mermaid image was still there. Her hair, brushing my cheek, was like seaweed. Part of me longed for her and felt a desire to shout out that Martin had not killed Sally, to break through the excuse she had manufactured to justify this ultimate yielding to her obsession.