Till Death Do Us Part Read online

  I drank the brandy. Then I bought a round. Then, fortunately, a party of three arrived and Navarro waddled off to play head waiter. I gave the three a quick, casual look and then concentrated on my brandy. One of them was the ice-and-frost Rosanne Norton. The other two were men, and both were working hard to claim all of her attention. I couldn’t understand their desire, but then she might have hidden charms.

  The older of the men was somewhere in his late thirties. He had the hefty build of a cattle baron type and the beaky-nosed, thin-lipped face that doesn’t look right without an expensive cigar stuck in it. To carry the cattle baron look further, he wore narrow-legged riding pants tucked into high-heeled boots and he carried a wide-brimmed hat.

  The other man was dressed almost the same, but his clothing had more of a worn look and his boots were strictly from work. So was his battered hat. He was a few years younger, I guessed, than la Norton herself. He was taller than his competitor but not so wide. Still, I thought, in a fight they should be about even.

  Rosanne Norton glanced over the room, saw me, and kept her eyes moving on. She was good. Most persons trying to avoid showing recognition would have given themselves away by the obvious effort of not appearing to see me. But she acted perfectly natural in the way she looked. I wondered if she really was a fine actress or if I was just beneath her notice.

  The brandy began to have a sour taste in my mouth, but I stayed around. I had no other place to go at the moment.

  I ordered coffee and sipped it. I watched the waiter, Paco, give Rosanne Norton’s party the red carpet treatment. I almost stared when I saw them served with fancy drinks. I returned to my coffee, meditating on the sad state of affairs when Texans gave up good bourbon for spiked fruit salad.

  Navarro found time to come to my table, even though the room was beginning to fill up. He looked from me to the Norton party. He said, “Rich Americans, those.”

  I said, “Which one belongs to the beautiful woman?”

  “Beautiful, si,” he conceded. “But made of ice. The older man is to be her husband. I believe they are celebrating the engagement. He is the señor Porter Delman, a rich cattle buyer of Fronteras.”

  I had the feeling that Navarro was curious about my interest. I said, “Is it a local custom to bring a third man to engagement parties?”

  “The young one is the foreman of the señora’s ranch.” His eyes were fixed sharply on my face. I wondered what he expected of me. “His name is Jim Kruse.”

  I let Navarro see that my interest in the two men was nil. Then a third man joined the party. Navarro called my attention to him. “If you are interested in local people, señor, there is a man you must meet. The señor Calvin Calvin, our famous radio announcer.”

  At this distance, all I could see was a small man who seemed to have a tendency to flit as he walked. He didn’t sit down at the table but went from one person to another, bending over to talk to them, so that his face was obscured. I told Navarro thanks just the same but I’d rather not meet anyone tonight.

  He seemed disappointed in me. I said, as he drifted off, “I hope the happy couple will celebrate many anniversaries.” I thought that was the least I could offer in return for his information.

  Nothing happened for some time, and then I saw Nace. I spotted him as he came into the bar from the street. He stopped and took a quick look around with that characteristic flip of his head. It was a movement made so fast that I never understood how he could see anything. But I’d known him long enough to be sure that he missed very little.

  His name was Ignacio Riveres Portales, and in the United States he would have been asked for identification before anyone would dare sell him a drink. He looked nineteen; he was twenty-eight. He was a journalist on one of the Mexico City dailies. In the old days we’d been friends. But since my trouble, I’d hardly seen him. He still spoke to me politely on the rare occasions when we met. It was the politeness I objected to. We’d reached the “thee” and “thou” stage in talking, and for him to return to a formal way of addressing me was insulting. And I had been in Mexico long enough to let such things bother me.

  I watched him walk into the room and past my line of vision. I wondered what he was doing here. Usually a place like Rio Bravo would be small pickings to a big city journalist. I thought about Pachuco being here. A few months ago Pachuco had been news. Nace could have followed him.

  A few months ago, I had been news too. And Nace could have followed me. Right now he could be waiting for me just as I was waiting for Pachuco.

  I was debating whether to go into the bar and approach Nace head on when there was a sudden spurt of noise from the rear of the room. I turned in time to see the dark curtains that formed the rear wall slide apart to reveal a small stage. On the stage was a three piece Mexican combo. The noise came from their instruments—two guitars and a marimba. The marimba player stepped forward and let the customers see his teeth.

  I noticed that in the last few minutes the room had filled up considerably, including a fair-sized group of those who had been in the bar. The Norton party was gone, but a group of four had taken their places.

  The marimba player was giving out with a typical m.c. spiel, first in Spanish, then in fair English. He wound up by saying, “And I now give you the young lady who has just come from a triumph in Washington, where she danced before the President—the señorita Arden Kennett!”

  The señorita Arden Kennett appeared all at once—literally. She burst out of the wings in a high flying ballet step, landed on her toes, and then seemed to go all to pieces. One leg went in one direction, the other in another direction. The woman had no joints. Or maybe she had extra joints. I wasn’t too sure. But I was enthralled. I gawked with the rest of the crowd. The guitars and the marimba went through a medley of wild Mexican dance tunes, and this Arden Kennett kept in time by gyrating first one part of her anatomy and then another. She finally gave a convulsive snap and tossed her pelvis at the wings. She went after it and disappeared. I beat my hands along with everyone else. If she hadn’t performed before the President, she should have.

  She came out to take a bow. Now she was standing still and I managed to get a good look at her. She might be an eccentric dancer but she was far from an eccentric looker. She was a blond, with hair the color of ripening wheat. She had large green eyes and a mouth made strictly for smiling. Her mouth and eyes were large and between them she had a bit of a tilted up nose with a scatter of freckles on it. She took her bows as if she’d been doing this sort of thing for some time.

  The band struck up as she left the stage. The customers drifted back to their drinking and eating. I decided that it was time for me to get out of this place.

  I paid my bill and went onto the poorly lighted sidewalk outside. I walked a half block toward the plaza, found a flight of steps, and perched on them. I was in shadow but I could see the doorway to the cantina clearly. I settled down to wait for Nace.

  The clock in the church tower chimed out ten. I could feel the late winter chill working up wetly from the river and I huddled into my light jacket. At first I enjoyed the cold; it kept me awake. But after a while I was stamping my feet and blowing on my fingers. I began to dislike this part of the country.

  The clock chimed midnight. I blinked and wondered where eleven o’clock had gone. I stood up. I was stiff and cold. My mouth was dry and my eyes were gritty. I blinked toward the lights of the cantina. A fine detective I was, sleeping on a stake-out.

  I stamped around on the steps until my circulation began to make itself felt. I swallowed until the saliva began to flow. I lit a cigaret. I debated whether to go into the cantina and see if Nace was still there or if Pachuco might have come in.

  I was at the foot of the steps when Nace came out. He wasn’t alone; there was a slender Mexican girl on his arm. They seemed to be arguing. She didn’t want to go in the direction Nace was taking her, but she wasn’t big enough to do much more than look angry.

  I backed into deep shadow. Th
e girl clicked along on high heels, her button of a nose stuck up in the air. She was no cantina girl; she was dressed too tastefully in a pale, summer weight suit with a light coat thrown over her shoulders. Her dark hair was curled and on it she had a saucy hat perched. She was like Nace, young and innocent looking. But Nace only looked that way. From the girl’s air, I felt she really was innocent.

  They were going toward the river. I followed, staying a half block back and walking as quietly as I could. When they reached the two blocks of honky-tonk set up for the tourist, I crossed the street and kept parallel to them.

  Nace walked the girl to the border and put her into the intercity bus waiting at the Mexican end of the river bridge. He said something that caused her to hoist her nose up another notch. She was real cute about it, but she wasn’t trying to be. She was too mad at him for that. She stalked back to a seat and sat down and refused to look when he tapped on the window from the outside.

  Finally the bus started and Nace turned to go. There was a wry grin on his face. I followed him again. Once I thought of moving in on him, but suddenly he seemed in a hurry, and I decided to find out what he was up to. He had obviously got rid of his girl so he could go about some business of his own.

  He headed straight for the Rio Bravo hotel. I stood outside the lobby doors and watched the clerk hand him a key. He took it and started for the stairs. As soon as he made the first bend, I went in, got my own key, and moved after him.

  I stopped at the top of the stairs, in a position where I could duck back out of sight. He walked to the far end of the hall and stopped before the left hand door. He didn’t use the key he had got from the clerk. Mexican hotel keys have tags too big to let you put them in your pocket. Even as far away as I was, I could see that Nace was using a key without a tag of that size.

  He tried three different keys before he got the door unlocked. He opened the door carefully, with as little noise as possible. He pulled it wide and stepped quickly into the room. I heard the door shut with only the faintest of clicks.

  I started down the hall, trying to avoid two creaking boards I’d noticed he’d stepped on. I reached the door and I had my hand out for the knob when it began to turn. I backed up quickly, stepping behind the curtain hanging over a fire escape window a few feet away. It wasn’t much protection; I didn’t think it would fool him if he looked around.

  But he didn’t look. He shut the door, not bothering to be too quiet now, and started on down the hall. About halfway to the stairs he stopped. He used his key with the big tag and unlocked a door. He went inside. I could hear him locking the door.

  I went to the room he had just left and tried the knob. He hadn’t relocked the door and it opened easily. I stepped in. The room was dark, and it had a bad smell. The smell was nothing tangible. It was more of an aura. The place felt wrong.

  I got out my pencil flashlight and worked the beam along the floor, straight out ahead of me. All I could see at first was rug and typical hotel furniture. I moved farther into the room and started working the light in a circle. It reached the davenport and stopped. I had pinned down a shiny black shoe.

  I walked to where I could see behind the davenport. The light moved up the shoe and along a bright yellow sock, past a trouser cuff, up a pair of gray gabardine slacks, yellow sport shirt, and finally to a fleshy neck. Before I focused the light on the face, I knew whom I would see.

  Enrico Pachuco had died in pain. His sharp, hawked features were twisted in agony. His mouth hung open and I could see his teeth, even the gold inlays in three of them. His eyes were open too, and they stared emptily at me. In death he was no longer burly, no longer tough. He would never again talk gutter Spanish out of the side of his mouth, never again think he was a Latin Edward G. Robinson.

  He would lie in the family plot beside his three brothers, who had died violent deaths, and there he would rot away.

  I didn’t think I gave a damn, even if he had been my partner.

  III

  ENRICO PACHUCO had been killed very quietly, very quickly. He had had a knife slipped between his ribs and into his heart.

  The murderer had pulled the knife out and taken it away, but I could see a tiny dark stain on the side of Pachuco’s jacket, and I could see the tear made in the cloth. I knelt down and now I could see the reason for the pain on Pachuco’s expression.

  One of his thumbs was mashed almost flat. It looked as if someone had put the thumb in a vice and then tightened down hard. I could also see the marks on Pachuco’s wrists and ankles where he had been tied. I lifted his head and saw the lump behind his ear.

  I stood up, smoothed the rug where my knees had crushed the nap, and took a step backward. I had been worried about Nace having come in here, but now I felt better. Nace hadn’t had time to do a job like this on Pachuco, nor—I was sure—would he knock a man out, then tie his wrists and ankles and, finally, when he woke up, torture him.

  I went to the body again and squatted down. Death had been quite recent, probably within the past two hours. The blood on Pachuco’s thumb was almost as fresh as that which came from the knife wound. I figured that he had been killed very shortly after he had been tortured.

  I wondered what the thumb masher had wanted. I wondered if he’d found it.

  I worked open Pachuco’s jacket and got my hand inside his pocket. I pulled out his wallet and looked longingly at the fat wad of mixed pesos and dollars. A lot of that money was profit made off me. But I left the money while I went through the card pockets. I found nothing out of the ordinary until I came to the little flap made to hold postage stamps. In it was a slip of paper. On the paper was a telephone number: Fronteras 3-4456, Mrs. N.

  I put the slip of paper in my pocket, wiped off the wallet, and returned it to Pachuco’s pocket. I got up and began a search of the room.

  I wasn’t the first to play this game. Someone—the murderer, I suspected, or perhaps Nace, had beaten me to it. Pachuco had been at the hotel for some time and he had accumulated a good deal of dirty laundry. It was scattered all over the floor of the closet. His dresser drawers had the contents all jumbled, and his two suits in the closet had been crumpled by searching hands.

  I wondered if the hunt had taken place before or after Pachuco was tortured. I wondered if the searcher had found what he wanted.

  And I wondered if what Pachuco had included information that I could have used to clear myself. Pachuco was a man who lived out of a suitcase. He was always on the move, for one reason or another. If he had written information telling what he had done to me, he would have carried it with him.

  I realized that I was thinking of him as though he were still alive. I wished that he were. The end of Pachuco was probably the end of my hope of getting back what I had lost.

  I was holding the desk blotter to the light to see if there was anything written on it when the sound of a door opening turned me around. The side door, connecting to the adjoining room, was opening. Light flooded in on me. I had a look at a shiny, dewlapped face, and at a shirt collar with reddish stains that looked as if they’d been made by flying spaghetti sauce.

  Julio Ricardo Fulgencio Navarro came into the room, snapped on the overhead light, and shut the door behind him. For a big man, he had very small feet. He rocked heel and toe so violently that I expected him to lose his balance. He stopped rocking and looked from me to that piece of Pachuco he could see from where he stood.

  “This is your room, señor?”

  I said, “My regrets. It is not.”

  He frowned and pursed his lips. He took a few steps into the room. Now he was in a position to see all of Pachuco. He said, “It is his, perhaps?”

  I said, “You should know. It’s your hotel.”

  We could keep up this game all night, but I was getting tired of it. I said, “Maybe I heard a noise and came to investigate. The door was open and I entered. I found him thus.”

  “Ah,” he said in the same voice he’d used to offer me brandy. “But your room is at
the other end of the hall, señor Blane.”

  I said, switching to English, “Checkmate. And now that you know my name, I assume you know a few other things too.”

  He chuckled, and said, also in English, “I know that this man was your former partner.”

  I said, “Were you expecting me, señor Navarro, or did you check up on me after I got to Rio Bravo?”

  “Perhaps a little of both,” he said.

  That was no answer, but I didn’t expect to get any more. I said, “Hadn’t we better call the policia?”

  “Is that wise?” His voice was so soft that I almost misunderstood him. “A dead man here. A man known to be his enemy also here.”

  It wasn’t wise. Especially not in Mexico. The police here were often slow to make arrests, but when they did, the man arrested was expected to prove his innocence; it wasn’t up to the law to prove his guilt.

  I said, “What do you suggest?” I was expecting him to name a figure. And if it was over what he usually chalked up as profits in an hour, I wouldn’t be able to pay.

  He nodded toward the door he’d come through. “Let us leave this room. It is more pleasant elsewhere.”

  We left. We went through the other room into the hall and down the stairs and to the rear of the hotel where Navarro had a suite of rooms next to his office. He was right; it was definitely more pleasant. I sat in an easy chair. Navarro chose the davenport. He lit a Havana cigar. I satisfied myself with a cigaret.

  He said, “And now I wish to know why you are here.”

  I had the feeling that he already knew a good deal of my business. I said, “I’m a private detective. I’m on a case.”

  He lifted his eyebrows when I stopped. I remained stopped. He said, “I realize you do not wish to violate a client’s confidence, but in a situation of this kind….”

  I said, “Sorry.”

  He sighed. “Then I shall tell you. Mrs. Norton, the charming lady you were interested in tonight, today flew to Mexico City and hired you to come here. This is correct?”