As Theodore had anticipated, Alejandro gouged him for more money as they neared the shore. “You’ve been paid enough,” Theodore said curtly, not even looking at him, and Alejandro subsided in shrugs and grumbles about wealthy misers.
But he drove his boat’s prow on to the sand and jumped out to give them a hand, as if they were persons of importance. “You’ll find a road at the top of the cliff,” he said, gesturing towards the steep, rocky hill that confronted them. “And listen, señor, I do not want any policía coming around to ask me questions, eh?”
“Understood,” Theodore said.
“Or else I’ll tell them your friend here did it,” Alejandro said, with a nod at Ramón. “Understand?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The sun touched the horizon lightly, like a buoyant orange balloon. Then rapidly the sea began to swallow it. Theodore stared at it out the window of the bus, felt its last burst of heat on his face, and tried to think what he must do next. Call Sauzas, of course, and leave it to him to inform the Acapulco police of Infante’s death—otherwise the police would detain them indefinitely for questioning. Alejandro and Miguel would have to be found, too, and this prospect was ghastly to Theodore. He felt exhausted, as spent as Ramón, who had leaned forward with his arms on his knees and put his head down. There was a smear of dark red blood on the roll of Ramón’s shirt-sleeve, and Theodore had discovered that the right knee of his trousers bore a stiff, dark circle, conspicuous on the grey cloth. Theodore wondered if they should try to get a plane out tonight, or find a hotel to sleep in.
The bus finished the sinuous Revolcadero highway along the cliff’s edge and began the steep descent to Acapulco. Already a few lights had been turned on, and Theodore heard the restless, insistent beat of the cha-cha-cha as the bus passed some open door. He would get out at the plaza, he thought, and telephone Sauzas. Now, out of habit, he looked at the people walking under the trees on the Malecón.
Suddenly he caught Ramón’s arm. “Come! We’re getting off!”
Ramón stood up.
The bus was slowing for a stop. They got off.
“Back this way,” Theodore said. “I think I saw Sauzas.”
“Sauzas? Are you sure?”
Theodore was not at all sure. It might have been a hallucination. But he thought he had seen him talking to two men beside a palm tree. “There! See him?”
Ramón did not acknowledge it, but he walked more slowly, his eyes on Sauzas; and Theodore knew Ramón would be thinking ‘How little it all means’, or something like that, even if they were going to put him in prison for fifteen years for the murder of a murderer.
Sauzas saw them from a distance also, and smiled a greeting. The two shirt-sleeved men with him stared at Theodore and Ramón and at the bloodstains on their clothing. “Señores! What luck!” Sauzas said. “I thought you had left for Mexico.” He turned to the two men and said: “Muchas gracias, señores. I’d like to speak to these gentlemen now. What has happened?”
Theodore told him of the encounter with Infante on the boat and of what happened there. He pulled the rolled muffler from his jacket pocket. “This is it.”
Sauzas’s brows went up. “A bright one. Ah, now it all fits,” he said quietly.
“What do you mean?” Theodore asked.
“Do you know whose this is?” asked Sauzas.
“No. I have no idea,” Theodore said. “Have you?”
“Hm-m. Señor Schiebelhut, Carlos Hidalgo is not home yet, and that’s why I’m here. I discovered he took ten thousand pesos from his bank—practically all the money he had. I put two and two together. The policía is now looking for Carlos Hidalgo.”
“I see,” Theodore said nervously. He had just told Sauzas that Infante had been paid ten thousand pesos for the muffler which he did not give up. “Lelia’s keys—they were on the boat,” Theodore went on. “They told me that when Infante arrived, he found the door open and Lelia dead. Whoever the muffler belongs to—must have just been there. Infante took the muffler and the keys and some other things and locked the door when he left. I learned also that he brought the flowers—to get in.”
“Ah-hah. So Infante thought at first the muffler must belong to one or the other of you.”
“Yes,” Theodore said, watching Ramón’s frowning face.
“Señor Schiebelhut, you’re pale,” said Sauzas. “Let’s cross the street and have something to drink.” He took Theodore’s arm.
They went into a sidewalk bar with no front wall, ordered double rums, and Theodore added to the order a pot of tea and two cups.
“Señor Capitán, how can we be sure whom the muffler belongs to?” Theodore asked. “All there is is a few circumstances—”
Sauzas put his blue packet of Gitanes on the table, took one out and lighted it. “Señores—yesterday afternoon I spoke to Señora Hidalgo. I told her of the withdrawal of the ten thousand pesos, which she knew nothing about. I suggested they might have been for the purchase of the muffler, and I told her where the muffler might have been found. With that, señores, she broke down. She admitted she had begun to wonder about Carlos herself, because of his behavior since the murder. I would say now she really believes he is guilty.” Sauzas looked rather slyly from one to the other of them, as if he had just uncovered a winning card. “When I left Mexico at noon today, Carlos was not home and neither was his wife! Nobody had answered the telephone since I saw his wife yesterday afternoon at two. We went to his apartment. Nobody is there.” Sauzas spread his hands in a shrug, and looked at them brightly.
Theodore still could not think it was that simple. “Isabel might have gone to her sister’s. She has a sister called Nina in Coyoacán—”
“Ah!” Sauzas shifted restlessly in his chair and watched the rums and the glasses of ice-water being set down on the table.
Ramón was staring at Sauzas with an angry, resentful expression. Then he looked at Theodore. “He thinks it was Carlos?”
“He is not sure. Nobody is sure yet,” Theodore murmured, feeling strangely embarrassed. He was aware, as he poured tea for Ramón and himself, that Sauzas was smiling, amused by him.
“Carlos may well be here, looking for Infante,” Sauzas said after his first sip of straight rum. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he kills himself. So many cliffs to jump off in Acapulco.” Sauzas turned to a small boy who had come up to the table, trying to sell the thin daily newspaper of Acapulco, shook his head, and dropped a coin in the child’s palm. “Andale!”
Theodore was thinking of Carlos’s evasiveness in the last months, of Carlos’s refusal to see him the times Theodore had called him. And it had been Isabel, he remembered, who had telephoned and wanted to go to Lelia’s funeral. But was it possible that Carlos had mutilated Lelia’s face?
“Well—I must telephone Mexico and tell them about Infante,” Sauzas said. “Or rather, I’ll call the policía here and let them worry with their long-distance telephones.” He winked and stood up. “With your permission, señores.”
Theodore watched him walk away to the wall telephone by the bar counter. His gait looked more rolling and self-assured than ever. And it was all so casual to him, Theodore thought, all in the line of a day’s work.
“He thinks it was Carlos, Theo?” Ramón asked.
A numb shock went over Theodore. “I don’t know. But it was not Salvador. Salvador was only a blackmailer.” He looked at Ramón’s eyes, where a dark comprehension was gathering. Ramón’s face had changed. Though lines and signs of fatigue were there, the confused frown had gone; and Theodore realized that Salavador Infante had at least jolted Ramón out of the conviction that he was her murderer. In that, it was as if the frail Salvador had lifted a mountain from Ramón.
“I see,” Ramón said finally. “And I’ve killed someone for no reason. It’s typical, typical, isn’t it, Teo?”
; Theodore gripped Ramón’s wrist. “You have not killed anyone. Will you get that idea out of your head, Ramón?”
“Yes,” Ramón said obediently, nodding. “I did not kill him. Just almost.”
“And forget the almost. Miguel killed him. And the boy was evil, very evil, anyway. That’s not a fact of importance for the policía, perhaps, that he was evil, but a fact for you. The boy himself had killed someone before.”
“The boy was evil,” Ramón repeated. “That is true.” He picked up his rum and drank it all at once.
Theodore released Ramón’s wrist and signaled for another round of drinks.
Sauzas came back to the table and said with a smile: “What do you know? The Acapulco police knew already that Infante was dead! They sit here gathering news from their informers and never stir off their backsides! . . . Would you gentlemen like a room for the night in the hotel where I am staying? You have no hotel, have you? . . . Well, I know I can get you some rooms where I am, because the manager is a crook of the third or fourth order and is being investigated by both the policía and a couple of insurance companies. He will do anything for me, even throw the President out to give me a room!” Sauzas chuckled and slapped Theodore’s shoulder.
“All right. We’ll accept. Thank you,” Theodore said.
“It’s a very comfortable hotel overlooking the bay. A marvellous view day and night. And after we go and wash up, I’ll invite you both to dinner! With your permission again, I’ll call—” He broke off, staring in the direction of the sidewalk.
Isabel Hidalgo was hurrying towards them.
Theodore and Ramón got to their feet.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for you!” she said with a frantic glance that took them all in. “Inocenza told me you were here,” she said to Theodore.
“Sit down, Isabel!” Theodore said, offering her his chair.
She sat down and looked at Sauzas. “He is here. I came with him yesterday afternoon—because, after all, I’m his wife,” she said with a quick, proud glance at Theodore and Ramón. “He is in our hotel room, and he wants to give himself up.” Her shoulders drooped as if this had taken her last strength to say.
“To give himself up? It’s true, then, Isabel?” Theodore asked, as astounded by her words as if no suspicion had crossed his mind before.
Isabel was nodding, nodding miserably.
Theodore dragged up an empty chair to sit on.
“Thank you for coming to us, señora.” Sauzas touched her arm compassionately, but he had time to look at Theodore and there was triumph in his eye. “Now what hotel is he in?”
“He told me to tell you everything—how he cut her with the knife to make it look like a maniac’s crime. He hit her first, then he got afraid because he thought he’d killed her. That’s what he told me,” Isabel said in a quick, soft voice. She stared at the table edge in front of her. “He said he got the knife from the kitchen—and he threw it away when he went out. He knew about the muffler then, but he was afraid to go back.”
“Is this the muffler, señora?” Sauzas asked, reaching for it from Theodore.
Theodore pulled the muffler from his jacket pocket and put it into Sauzas’s hand.
Isabel looked at it and nodded. “Yes, it’s the one I gave him on New Year’s. I remembered—I really remembered when you asked me, but I wasn’t sure. . . . Oh, Teo!” Her hand slid towards his on the table and stopped.
Theodore patted her hand, and felt a terrible pity for her. He stared at a pattern of thin blue veins in the back of her hand. The hand slipped from under his and brushed back her disordered hair.
“There’s nothing more, is there? Just go and get him,” Isabel said to Sauzas. “He wants you to come.”
“I shall, I shall,” Sauzas said. “Now which direction is the hotel in, and what is its name?”
“Hotel Quinta Antonia—just a little place, here to the left. Perhaps three streets—or five. But not far,” Isabel said, her voice shaking with tears. “Oh, what’s he done, Teo? Done to you and Ramón and all of us? He said he was in love with her and yet he did—that.”
Theodore was remembering the way Carlos had used to help Lelia on with her coat, the way Ramón and he had joked with her about liking Carlos, and Lelia had said: “Not in a million years”, or something like that. Lelia had said to Ramón, in his presence, that he had nothing to worry about from Carlos, and of course there hadn’t been anything to worry about—except that Carlos finally killed her. “You’ll come with us to our hotel tonight, Isabel,” Theodore said. “There you’ll be able to rest.”
Ramón, silent and pale, stood up as Sauzas did.
“You want to come, too?” asked Sauzas.
Ramón hesitated. “No. I believe. And maybe if I saw him, I would kill him, too.”
Sauzas smiled at Theodore. “Why don’t you wait here for me, señor? I should not be more than ten minutes, if he’s co-operative.”
Theodore walked with Sauzas towards the front of the place, unwilling to let him go without another word, and yet he did not know what the word ought to be, either from him or Sauzas.
On the sidewalk, Sauzas lifted his arm at a passing libre, which went on by without noticing him. “You know, Señor Schiebelhut, you showed great faith in your friend Señor Otero. Some people thought the police stupid not to hold on to a man who confessed to stabbing a woman to death. But we did know something that you didn’t know. From the autopsy, we found that Señorita Ballesteros died from a heavy blow on the back of her head. We think her head struck—with great force—the back of her bed. . . . Ah, here’s a libre. The knifing came later, and we thought we knew why. Well, we did!” He beamed and opened the door of the libre. “Until a few minutes, señor! Adiós!”
As he walked back into the restaurant, a shocking picture came to Theodore’s mind—Lelia hurled to the bed by Carlos Hidalgo, who wouldn’t take no for an answer. He stopped a waiter and told him to bring some more hot tea and another cup. Ramón and Isabel were talking, Ramón leaning towards her, Isabel with her head higher now, and apparently in better possession of herself. Theodore sat down quietly.
Ramón looked at him and said: “If Carlos were to walk in here now, I think I would wring his neck and nobody would be able to stop me, not even bullets.”
But Theodore did not think he would. Ramón’s vindictiveness was all but spent, first against himself and then against Salvador Infante. At that moment, Theodore supposed that he himself carried a greater charge of hatred and vengeance against Carlos than Ramón, but the conviction that it, like most passions, would eventually abate kept him sitting in his chair, while Sauzas went to get Carlos. “Don’t imagine it. Don’t imagine what you haven’t done. You are always doing that, Ramón.” He glanced at Isabel.
A strange, gentle smile had come to Isabel’s colorless lips, as if somehow her senses had vanished, at least for these few moments, and her tormented mind was enjoying a brief peace.
“It’s like a game in which nobody wins, isn’t it, Teo?” Ramón said. “Neither you nor I nor Carlos nor Salvador Infante—only Sauzas. Only the policía.”
Theodore did not answer.
A silence fell among them. None of them stirred, and Isabel sat like a smiling statue that did not even breathe.
Patricia Highsmith, A Game for the Living
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