Jeopardy Is My Job Page 5

  “Hell,” I said. “The guy’s your husband.”

  “Yes, but the Governor hired you. I didn’t.” I could have said the Governor had hired me out of a sense of obligation and duty, while she loved her husband. I didn’t though. If she was as secret and solitary as a cat, and if Robbie had to find approval like a little boy, I had my own cross to bear too. I could get so close to people and no closer. Then this barrier gets in the way. If you want to know why, ask my ex-wife—not that she’s anyplace where you could ask her.*

  So instead of saying what I could have said, I asked, “Was Tenley out all night too?”

  Andrea Hartshorn froze up on me. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I guess nothing. Well, me for some shuteye.”

  I went inside and far, far away from her.

  If you follow the paving stones of the ramp and steps that lead from the big mill-tower that gives Torremolinos its name down toward the beach, anyone in town will tell you, you’ll reach a small adobe house at the bottom of the steps and backing on a stand of rushes beyond which lies the beach and the blue, blue Mediterranean. This was where the blind sculptor Fernando worked and lived with his wife Marcia, North Country by way of Malta, who had swatted Mrs. Stu Huntington in the chops the night before last.

  I went down there on foot at about three that afternoon under a sun about as hot as a Mediterranean sun ever gets, which is hot enough for anybody. As I reached the door and mopped my forehead and the back of my neck with a limp handkerchief, I heard the sound of metal striking metal inside. The door was opened by a maid wearing a black uniform and a frilly white apron.

  “Francisca?” called North Country from inside the dark, cool house. “Quién es?”

  I identified myself and Francisca identified me, and North Country, still in torero pants and still looking better than six feet tall and this time barefoot, drifted out to squint at me and the sunlight. She had a way of appraising you in absolute silence that was disconcerting, her eyes taking all of you in before she committed herself even to a word of greeting.

  “To make up for his blindness?” I asked.

  “What? Oh, I see. I never thought of it that way. If you want to know the truth, I think looking at people like that puts them on the defensive.”

  “Why should you want to put me on the defensive?”

  “Francisca said you were investigating the disappearance of Robbie Hartshorn. You scared her by the way, love,” said North Country, putting on the broad vowels, I thought, more than necessary. To show me what a simple, uncomplicated type she was? “An investigation in Spain means the police, you see, and there isn’t a Spaniard who doesn’t fear the police. How can I help you in your investigation?”

  “You can invite me in out of the snow.”

  She laughed, not straining her jaw-hinge but enough to show the joke was appreciated. “It is beastly hot, isn’t it? But you should try Malta this time of year.”

  We went into a large, dark room furnished with heavy pieces as graceful as a spontanato’s one and only lunge at his chosen bull. I sat. She sat. Francisca brought me a bottle of San Miguel beer. From somewhere further in the gloom of the small-windowed house came a sound that went clink, clink, clink.

  “Husband working?”

  “He doesn’t need light. That’s an advantage he has over any other sculptor in a hot climate in summer. He’s doing a bronze in cire perdu. That means lost wax, Mr. Drum. First he makes a clay model and covers it with a thin coat of wax and covers that with a mold of perforated plaster. Into a furnace it goes, and after the wax melts and runs out through the perforations he pours in molten bronze. Then out comes the statue, the bronze hardens, the plaster is chopped off—and there you have it.” I drank my beer. She said, “Dear me, love, am I boring you?”

  “I’ll bet he wasn’t working last night,” I said.

  “Last night? Why should he have been?”

  “No reason at all. I ran into him in Fuengirola, where he spent some time with Stu Huntington, who was getting red in the face.”

  “As Stu has been known to get, love. So what?”

  “So shortly after that Stu got himself killed.”

  “Killed?” she squawked, and either it was news to her or she had her guard up as high as the wall around Franco’s palace. “God, how did it happen?”

  I told her Sergeant Martinez’ approved version of the story. She said nothing until I finished, then she bit her lip and said, “No wonder Nancy Huntington wasn’t around today. She bothers Fernando all the time, and he’s not the only one. She makes it so obvious you’d think she was trying to prove something to herself. But I.… shouldn’t be talking like this, not with her husband dead, whatever she’s like.”

  “You know any reason why Fernando should have been in Fuengirola with Stu Huntington last night?”

  “They often did their drinking together. Here, in Malaga, in Fuengirola, in La Linea across the border from Gibraltar, even in Algeciras sometimes. Fernando needs the stimulus of fresh sounds, he says. They were compatible drinking partners, and Stu often used to chauffeur him around.”

  “They weren’t compatible drinking partners last night.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with Robbie’s disappearance, love, but anyway you’d have to ask Fernando about that, not me.”

  “He make all his money sculpting?”

  “Enough for our needs. He’s damned good.”

  “That’s not what I asked. I asked if he made all his money that way.”

  “He has some investments.”

  “What kind?”

  “The usual kind. Please stop cross-questioning me.”

  “Smugglers’ contraband? That kind of investment?”

  “I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

  “Robbie Hartshorn may be in serious trouble,” I said. “If he’s still alive.”

  She crossed her legs the other way, her thigh flattening and broadening in the tight stretch fabric of the torero pants.

  “You know the Fuentes brothers?” I asked.

  “I’ve seen them fight at the bull ring in Fuengirola.”

  She had that way of smoothly turning a question away from its target, so I said again, “That’s not what I asked. I asked if you knew them.”

  Silence. Somewhere in the house a faucet was turned on. The clinking sound, which had stopped, was resumed.

  “Huntington drove with your husband to the Fuentes’ cave before the accident. They parked outside. When the accident happened, Fernando wasn’t in the car with Huntington.”

  “Is that an accusation, love?”

  “It’s a statement. You husband’s a lucky guy.”

  “It is an accusation. Get out of here.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What if I admitted it was an accusation? What if I went further and said there was no accident?”

  “You mean Stu Huntington isn’t dead?” Relief flooded her eyes. For a moment I thought she would bust out crying, but then her eyes narrowed and she said in a cold rage, “You invented that story, you lied to me just to get me talking?” She stood up, clenching her competent-looking fists to keep her hands from shaking. “Get.… out.… of here.… right now.”

  “That’s not what I mean. He’s dead all right. The Guardia call it an accident. I call it murder.”

  “Fernando!” she bellowed lustily, and the clinking stopped and her husband came out of his studio.

  Though he carried no cane and didn’t grope with his hands, he walked with the special care of the blind. There was plaster dust on his hands, a white smudge of it on his forehead and more on his black shirt. The tone of his wife’s voice had alarmed him.

  “Qué pasa?” he asked. His eyes had that pathetically blank look of the blind.

  “This man is Mr. Drum,” she said in Spanish. “He is a private detective in the United States. He came here to find Robbie Hartshorn.”

  The blind man’s eyes turned in my general direction and stared past
my left shoulder. I couldn’t pretend a lack of Spanish; I’d spoken it to the maid. He groped for my hand. I shook his. We went through the amenities in Spanish, North Country waiting impatiently. Then she asked, “Did you go to Fuengirola with Stu last night?”

  His eyes moved toward the sound of her voice. He didn’t answer.

  “This man claims he saw you there.”

  “Then he has an advantage over me. I could not have seen him in any event.”

  I said, “You and Huntington had some drinks and an argument at a bodega called the Costa del Sol. Then you drove with him in a Lancia sports car to the cave of Fuentes.”

  His blank eyes could not register surprise. “I deny that.”

  “Why bother? I saw you there.”

  He asked, “Is this the way you try to find Robbie Hartshorn, señor?”

  “He went to Fuentes’ cave too. That’s where the trial ends.”

  The blind man shrugged. “I cannot speak about what I do not know. What is this cave of Fuentes?”

  “Among other things,” I told him, “a garage—for a truck that had no business there—unless it was loaded to the tailgate with contraband.”

  He laughed. “Contraband?”

  His wife did not laugh. “Stu’s dead, this man says.”

  Fernando laughed again, but not as if he’d heard something funny. “And how did he die, señor?”

  “He was killed by a blow to the head. Then he was put in the Lancia, behind the wheel, and it went downhill and finally off a cliff. All this a few minutes after you drove out there with him. Lucky for you you couldn’t see it, huh? You’re blind. It might have given you a bad night’s sleep.”

  North Country sighed. A muscle twitched on the side of Fernando’s jaw. “Exactly what are you accusing me of?”

  “That depends on what you did after driving out there with Huntington.”

  The muscle twitched again. “Be careful,” North Country warned me in English. “My husband has a violent temper.”

  If she was right, that suited me fine. A man doesn’t watch his tongue if he has to watch his temper. In Spanish I asked, “Does he get violent enough to commit murder?”

  Fernando wore his black shirt with the tails out, and below that a pair of faded jeans with tool-pockets. He crouched, reached behind himself and came up with a ball-peen hammer coated with white plaster dust. It was big enough, and looked sufficiently deadly in Fernando’s hand, to have done the job on Stu Huntington’s temple. North Country wasn’t kidding. Her husband had a temper all right. No TV cowboy could have drawn his six-shooter, the one with all the notches on the butt, any faster than he drew that ball-peen hammer. He swung it toward the rising inflection of the goading question I’d asked. His aim was good enough to have decorated the floor with a full set of Chester Drum teeth, and then what would have happened to the smile that wins friends and influences people? So I stepped back and to one side, and the hammer only numbed my left shoulder. I grabbed his wrist. North Country shouted something. I twisted, and the hammer fell. Just then there was a knock at the door. The maid, as Spanish maids will, appeared out of nowhere to open it. The blind man shuddered and sighed. I released his wrist.

  Silhouetted against the bright sunlight in the doorway, wearing a dress as black as the maid’s and no make-up on her face, stood Stu Huntington’s widow.

  “I didn’t know you had company,” she said.

  “Mr. Drum was just leaving,” North Country told her.

  Nancy Huntington had developed a shiner that made her left eye look like a purple plum. She seemed to bear no malice toward the woman who had given it to her, and except for her widow’s weeds and lack of make-up, she wasn’t staggering under the weight of her bereavement.

  I rubbed my shoulder. Everybody except Fernando stared down at the ball-peen hammer. “I’ll walk you outside,” North Country told me.

  She did, and in the sunlight said, “When a husband dies, love, and if it’s murder or could be murder, where do the police turn automatically for their first suspect?”

  I said nothing. I wanted her to say it.

  “The wife, love. The wife every time. Don’t they?”

  “You speaking in generalities, or do you have something to go on?”

  “You’re the detective, love.”

  Inside, in her throaty voice I heard Nancy Huntington say, “Stu was in an accident last night. He’s dead.”

  I started up the steps and the uneven paving stones of the ramp, walking gingerly because my shoulder was beginning to throb with pain. I turned once to look back, but North Country already had gone inside. The door stood ajar. The doorway was as black as a hangman’s mask.

  *See The Second Longest Night by Stephen Marlowe.

  chapter seven

  I took the bus along the corniche road to Fuengirola. It was loaded with Spaniards and expatriates, all heading for the iron bull ring and another afternoon of blood, sand and novilla butchery, the Spaniards looking grim and dedicated, the foreigners happy and relaxed. Except for the rare stranger gifted with afición as the Spaniards feel it, no foreigner understands the awesome tragic beauty of the running of the bulls.

  When I pulled the cord to get off on the outskirts of Fuengirola, I drew stares. Except for the driver, who would be shuttling passengers to the bull ring until the blare of the opening trumpet, I was the only one not geting off at the end of the line. Which suited me fine. The chances of running into anyone at the cave of Fuentes were slim. The chances of running into Ruy Fuentes or his picador brother were nil. If I was really lucky I might not be hit over the head with a truck again.

  They had removed what remained of the Lancia from the beach. The road and burro-trail were as steep as I had remembered them, and the view of the town and the sea kept changing as I climbed. When I had gone high enough I could see the bus pulled up at the bull ring at the far end of town, disgorging an army of ants.

  No signs of life on the burro-trail, nothing sinister, nothing to indicate a man had died here last night. It was just a trail that led past a sheer wall that was part of the Tecada Mountains, and the wall was dotted with the mouths of caves where gypsies lived, and so what if at the end of the trail were two caves that belonged to the brothers Fuentes and the gypsy woman who lived with them?

  Big cave entrance and small: it was last night all over again. I entered the big one, and it was cool and damp as soon as I left the sunlight behind me. I sniffed. It smelled like a garage, which was no surprise.

  Ten strides from the entrance, I hit a wall of wood, soft pine in vertical slats with no chinks between them. I explored the edges with my hands. The fit of wood and cave wall wasn’t snug, but nothing much bigger than a mouse could squeeze through. I lit a match and did some groping. There were no hinges. I looked up. The barrier of soft pine had been lowered from the roof of the cave like a portcullis. Make something out of that, I thought. There’s no law against doors in caves, is there?

  I got down on hands and knees, lit another match and groped some more. A padlock joined a thick iron staple at the base of the pine with another staple that had been driven into the floor of the cave: an ideal arrangement for jimmying with a pint-sized crowbar, but I didn’t have a pint-sized crowbar or any kind at all. Could I pry the staple out of the soft pine with by boy-scout knife, with which no private detective is ever without? I decided it was possible, and reached into my pocket for the knife.

  “Don’t move,” a voice said in Spanish. “Remain on your knees, señor.” The voice belonged to a woman, and it sounded confident enough for me to believe her when she said, “I have a gun. It is pointing at your back. I will use it if you force me to. Now slowly back toward me. No! Still on your knees. Yes, that way.” The back of my head tingled. I thought I was in for another sapping.

  “I thought all the world would be at the running of the bulls,” I said brightly and hopefully in my best Spanish.

  “I never go anymore. Not since Ruy was hurt. Who are you?”


  “You’re Maruja,” I said. “I wanted to meet you. Is this far enough?”

  “Yes.” A hand frisked me calmly and in no hurry. Boy-scout knife and wallet were removed. I could smell her perfume. The base was crushed orange blossoms: it always is. But her scent was more musky than flowery, as befitting a gypsy woman who lived in a cave and sang mournful gypsy songs in the night.

  “Ches-tair Droom,” she said. “I do not know you.”

  That meant she was going through the cards in the wallet, and that meant she would be having trouble pointing the gun, if any, down at my back. She said, “Why did you wish to meet me?” and I whirled and stood and saw the wallet in her left hand and the gun, a Luger, in her right, close together. She let go of the wallet. I got the Luger. Unlike Fernando and his ball-peen hammer, she didn’t struggle to keep possession of it.

  “It isn’t loaded,” she said, and smiled. I yanked the clip from the butt. It was empty. She crouched calmly for the wallet and gave it to me. I slammed the empty clip back into the Luger. She was still smiling. She looked as nervous as a well-fed lioness. For no reason at all I returned the gun to her. She scowled at it, shrugged and threw it away. Literally. It struck the pine boards, hit the floor and bounced against the wall of the cave.

  “Why’d you do that?” I asked.

  “Of what use would an empty gun be? You wished to meet me, you said. Here we are. Besides, I always do exactly what I wish. I am a gitana—a gypsy.”

  Nobody, I told myself, was that ingenuous. I gestured at the wall of pine boards. “What’s behind it?”

  “Who knows?” In Spanish those two words mean more than they do in English. Quién sabe?—some knowledge is difficult and unpleasant, so why bother? “I can guess, though, if you wish. I hear the trucks coming and going in the night, after all. I see the Guardia sergeant climbing the hill once a week for his pesetas. Bah, that pig! With a wife and five children in Fuengirola, and every time we meet he asks me to go to bed with him. ‘You are not young, Maruja,’ he says, ‘and a woman’s good years melt away like the snow on the Sierra Nevada in summer.’ Bah, that pig!” she said again. “I am twenty-five. Is that old? But if I were forty-five and he were the only man who looked at me that way, it would still be the same. Gitanas are promiscuous, he thinks. He has much to learn. Gitanas sleep with no man who offers himself as a gift. It is the gitana who makes the gift.”