A Game for the Living (9 page)

CHAPTER NINE

Sauzas was on the corner when Theodore arrived, walking up and down restlessly and smoking. Theodore got out of his
libre
—he would have taken his car, but it was impossible to park here—and crossed the street, dodging bicyclists and trucks because he was against the light. He took out the postcard, that he had carefully put in the inside pocket of his jacket.

“
Buenas,
” Sauzas said casually, and held the card close to his eyes, reading it. He turned it over, removed the cigarette from his mouth and smelled the card. “Do you know anybody in Florida now?”

“No. Lelia has a cousin there, Inés Jackson, who lives in Orlando. I've never met her. Her name was mentioned in the newspapers as one of the surviving relatives.”

“Hm-m. Lelia was on good terms with her?”

“Yes, as far as I know. Not close, but—”

“Okay,
vamonos,
” Sauzas said, and with his rolling gait started off for Ramón's door.

The narrow door of Ramón's apartment house was open, and two barefoot little girls were playing a game with bottle tops on the dirty tiles. Sauzas pushed the bell under Ramón's name, though Theodore remembered the bell never worked, and they began to climb the stairs. On the first floor, one went along a passage to a broader flight of stone stairs and climbed again for three flights. They walked down the corridor to a tall grey door and knocked.

No answer.

“Ramón? You had better open! Capitãn Sauzas!”

They heard Ramón's carpet-slippered feet approaching the door. The door opened, and Ramón's haggard, unshaven face showed a slight surprise at the sight of Theodore. He was in limp, pink-striped pajamas. Sauzas pushed the door open and went in.

Ramón had evidently been lying in bed. The bedding was tousled, and there was an ashtray on the bed and another on the floor beside the bed. A pair of trousers had been flung over a chair. The room reached up to a meaninglessly high ceiling, as if, like so many apartments in this section of the city, it had been partitioned from some enormous gubernatorial chamber that had once been elegant. In the corner near the kitchenette, Ramón's little pale blue parakeet worked indefatigably at its cage door, which kept failing with irregular
clang-clangs
. Theodore could never bear to watch it.

“We have here an interesting postcard,” Sauzas said to Ramón. “Would you like to see it?”

Ramón had sat down on the messy bed. He took the postcard, and Theodore saw his scalp move as he read it. “Who wrote this?”

“We don't know. We wanted to ask if you knew anything about it.”

Ramón looked at Theodore accusingly. “One of your American friends?”

“He says he doesn't know anybody who is in Florida now.”

“You see the date, February eighteenth. You don't know anybody who could have done this trick, Ramón? If we find out who did it, we may find the murderer,” Sauzas said.

Ramón stared with his pink, purple-circled eyes down at the floor, then closed his eyes tightly and swayed to one side, down to his pillow. He had lost weight, Theodore could see from his face and his shoulders. Theodore was really shocked at the way he looked.

“Ramón, sit up!” Sauzas moved towards him, and Theodore turned away, unable to stop it and unable to watch it.

Theodore heard a sound as if Sauzas had slapped his face. On a drop-leaf table, propped up against a rather Russian-looking mosaic icon of Christ on the cross, was a snapshot of Lelia in a bathing-suit at Acapulco. Theodore could barely remember having seen the picture before. It was cracked at the corners and curved, as if Ramón had been carrying it in his wallet. Christ seemed to be looking right down at her.

“Ramón! Do you know anybody who was going to Florida?”

Theodore turned round as he heard Sauzas sigh. Sauzas looked at Theodore and opened his arms helplessly.

“He has been this way for two weeks. Like pulling teeth to get him to tell you what day it is. Not that he knows.” Sauzas took off his hat and dropped it in the seat of a straight chair. “Ramón, do you want to help us find the killer or not?”

“I killed her,” Ramón said against his pillow.

“What? You killed her?” Sauzas moved towards Ramón. “You killed her, eh, Ramón?”

“Yes.”

“Tell us about it, Ramón. Where is the knife?”

“Behind the stove,” Ramón mumbled.

Sauzas pulled him up roughly by the shoulder. “What stove? Her stove?”

“Yes.”

Theodore felt a pain in his throat and realized he had not been breathing. “You
dog,
Ramón!” He started towards Ramón, and Sauzas's arm struck him across the chest.

“We'll soon find out, Señor Schiebelhut,” Sauzas said. “No need to fight now. I must make a telephone call.”

Ramón looked up at Theodore, red-eyed and defiant.

“Extension eight four seven,” Sauzas said. “
Bueno,
Enrique?
.
.
.
Enrique,
por favor
.” He got a cigarette and a matchbox and lighted the cigarette with one hand.

Theodore felt suddenly too revolted to hit Ramón or to touch him. Ramón was like something already dead, he thought. He had died during these three weeks since the murder.

“
Bueno,
Enrique. Ramón Otero says there is a knife behind the stove in the kitchen of the Ballesteros apartment
.
.
.
Si!
” Sauzas said, his voice breaking with excitement. “At once! At once! I am at Otero's apartment. Do you have the number?
.
.
.
Yes, as soon as possible!” He hung up and looked at both of them, smiling, walking towards them. “So you will talk now, Ramón? Tell me about it. What happened?”

Ramón with a shuddering sigh plunged his forehead against his two palms. “We had a quarrel.”

“Yes? About what?”

“I wanted her—to go away with me.”

“Where?”

Ramón took several seconds. “I wanted her to marry me.”

“And she said no? She said she was in love with Theodore, perhaps?”

“No,” said Ramón positively, “but she wouldn't marry me and so I—I killed her. Yes. I killed her.” Now Ramón stared in front of him, his hands on his knees, his back stooped like a tired old man's. “I stabbed her,” he said in a whisper.

“And then?” asked Sauzas, listening attentively.

“I stabbed her,” Ramón repeated.

Sauzas watched him. “And did you bring the flowers?”

“I can't remember. I think I went out and got them—and brought them back. And then I went out and locked the door, I remember.”

“The flowers were bought between ten-thirty and eleven thirty. You bought them after you killed her?” Sauzas asked.

“Oh yes,” Ramón said. “I am sure of it, because—”

“Go on, Ramón.”

But Ramón did not go on. He stared, as if he were peering to see something in the air in front of him. The time would fit, Theodore thought, if he bought the flowers after he killed her. And it was like Ramón to do something crazily cynical, to bring flowers after such a ghastly act and dump them on the table.

Sauzas walked restlessly up and down the room.

Theodore, impatient for the telephone to ring, moved towards the kitchenette, an uncurtained, unpartitioned unit of sink and two-ring gas-burner which sat atop a small icebox in the corner of the room. On the gas-burner was a bowl with a spoon in it and half an inch of tomato soup drying and turning dark red at the edge. In the sink stood a Campbell's can with a jagged lid sticking up. And thumb-tacked over the sink was Lelia's cartoon of Ramón washing dishes, smiling straight out of the picture—a very handsome Mexican face with a shining head of hair—water splashing every which way. Theodore heard Sauzas's step and turned round.

Sauzas peered at the parakeet.

The bird was working more slowly now, trying as ever to brace its little claws on two of the vertical, slippery bars as it raised the door with its beak. It could pull the door up nearly three inches, far enough for it to have got out if it had been at the bottom of the cage; but by that time the claw feet were slipping downwards, the beak had to release the door and clutch at another bar, and the door dropped shut again with a little tinny clang. And it went to work again, energetically bracing its claws for the upward pull of the door. Theodore turned round suddenly, irritated with himself for having watched it. There was ambiguity in this, too: was the bird really trying to get out, or was the door just its favorite toy? Ambiguity was the secret of life, the very key to the universe! Why had Ramón killed Lelia? Because he loved her. Theodore had a depressing premonition that he would never hate Ramón enough for what he had done.

“Such persistence should be rewarded.” Sauzas bent closer to the cage, and now Theodore looked again.

Clang . . . clang-clang
. A pause of several seconds while the bird rested its tired muscles, or perhaps exerted its tiny brain to devise a better method of bracing itself. Then
clang-clang . . . clang
.

The telephone rang and Sauzas darted across the room. “Ah-hah
.
.
.
Ah-hah,” he said, his head enveloped in smoke. “Good, good.
.
.
.
Well, that fits. He washed it.” His eyes slid slyly over to Ramón, who was still looking blankly in front of himself. “Fine. Yes. At the station.” Sauzas hung up, frowned as he took another puff of his cigarette, and said to Theodore: “The knife was there. They had to move the stove. It was wedged behind the stove. And his thumb-print is on it.” He looked at Ramón. “You washed the knife, didn't you?”

“Yes,” Ramón said, nodding.

“All right, Ramón! Get dressed! You're going to prison. And this time not getting out so soon.”

Ramón stood up slowly and moved towards his closet.

“What kind of a knife?” asked Theodore.

“One of the kitchen knives. The blade fits the stabs in the body. Enrique said it was a good-sized knife that had been whetted down very much,” Sauzas said, his eyes on Ramón.

Theodore suddenly remembered the knife. It was like some butchers' knives, with a wide blade that tapered to a point. Lelia had had it as long as he had known her. Theodore looked at Ramón's slowly moving figure in front of the open closet. What could they do to a man like that? What punishment was just? They should mete out to him what he had done to Lelia, and in lieu of the rape castrate him.

“We shall take care of him,” Sauzas said to Theodore, as if he could read his thoughts.

Ramón had pulled on a white T-shirt, and he put his pale blue jacket on over it. He had on dark trousers. He might have been dressing in his sleep. And so he walked towards them. Sauzas pulled him by the arm towards the door.

Theodore looked at the bird, then went and took its cage down from the hook. He took also the green cloth that Ramón used to cover the cage and pocketed a box of birdseed. Ignoring Sauzas's smile at him, he followed the two out.

Ramón turned in the opposite direction to the stairs and walked down the corridor.

“Ramón!” Sauzas called.

“He is going to the toilet,” Theodore said, but Sauzas still followed him a few steps suspiciously.

Ramón disappeared behind a narrow door.

“Is there a window in there?” Sauzas asked uneasily.

“I don't think so.”

“If there is, he'd be dead, anyway, from this height,” Sauzas said, with an indifferent lift of his black brows.

They waited, and finally from the little w.c. that Theodore knew was lightless and paperless and sometimes even waterless came a torrential, sustained sound of flushing. Then Ramón came out and they proceeded, Ramón first, then Sauzas, then Theodore. Ramón did not seem to notice that Theodore carried his bird.

“I would like to go to the Cathedral,” Ramón said on the sidewalk.

“The Cathedral? At the Zócalo?”

“Just for a moment. It's not far.”

Sauzas looked annoyed, yet Theodore could see his Catholic mind yielding. “Very well. Come on, but don't be all night. And don't try any funny business inside, understand?”

They began to walk. After only half a block, they could see the yellowish spires of the Cathedral of Mexico against the sky. The blocks of Ramón's neighborhood were all huge, square and gloomy with the gloom of former grandiosity now degenerated to shoddy little shops and dilapidated apartments. An old barefoot woman with a face like a shrunken monkey's stepped into their path and demanded, for the love of God, a few centavos. Her clawlike hands slipped from Ramón's jacket and caught at Theodore's. Recoiling in his nervousness as if a snake had touched him, Theodore with the same movement reached in his pocket and brought up some loose centavos and dropped them into her little wrinkled palm. Ramón stepped off the curb directly into the way of a
libre
that was coming around the corner at full speed, and Theodore grabbed his arm involuntarily and pulled him back.

A light sweat broke out over Theodore. Angry with himself because he had saved Ramón from the
libre,
he said between his teeth: “You've a fine nerve going into your church after what you've done!”

Ramón glanced at him with resentment and fear, but he said nothing.

A string of light globes from some fiesta or holiday still followed the outline of the domes and spires on the Cathedral's façade, light globes plain and colored, askew in tangles of electric wires. The face of the Cathedral was beautiful, its carvings and ornaments abraded by time and rain, bullet-pocked, all mellowed to a soft yellowish dust color. Just outside the gates, a man was hawking popcorn from a cart. Children played with tops, and men lounged in the forecourt, talking and smoking, buying Chiclets and penny candies from the small boys who flitted about selling them. Some six or eight women and girls with bright-colored scarves tied under their chins came out of the Cathedral just as they went in. The girls were all chattering.