Nipped in the Bud (13 page)

The dust of their departure was only just beginning to settle, and, old Indian tracker that she was, Miss Withers decided that half an hour sooner and she would have bumped into the girls head-on. So near and yet so far; she felt like the farm boy who almost heard the cow bell. Yet just possibly there were things still to be learned here. She closed her eyes and sniffed, noting a heavy, exotic perfume and a lighter one, probably gardenia; bath salts, cigarettes, leather, and fingernail polish.

Pari-mutuel tickets from this very afternoon’s improvement of the breed at Caliente were scattered on the floor, mostly ten-and fifty-dollar win tickets. There was a marked program, much thumbed and twisted. Somebody had made neat checkmarks against the names of the lighter-weighted horses. Somebody had also, if one could judge by the remaining tickets, lost well over eight hundred dollars today. Other flotsam and jetsam included a spool of No. 50 white thread, a sheer nylon stocking (size 7) without a visible snag or run, an almost new Canasta deck, a dozen tickets on next Wednesday’s drawing of the Lotería Nacional at Mexico City, a bitten apple and an empty aspirin bottle.

The bathroom was equally unrevealing, except that forgotten in the tub was an almost new cake of scented soap which the schoolteacher estimated would have cost two or three dollars back home. In the trash basket were used facial tissue, the shell of a carmine lipstick, half-a-dozen empty beer cans and a quart bottle that had once held prefabricated Manhattan cocktails.

There was still the small bedroom with its twin beds, both neatly made up but bearing on their spreads the mark of suitcases flung open for packing. The closets were bare except for dangling wire hangers, the bureau drawers all half-open and askew. In one of them Miss Withers noticed several bronze hairpins, a pair of tiny green dice, some spilled face powder, and a sales slip from Anton’s on the Avenida for a fifty-dollar alligator handbag. She began to have a growing feeling of frustration. No letters, no lost little address book, no diary or telephone numbers hastily scribbled on a wall somewhere.

Back in the living room the schoolteacher riffled through the piles of American magazines on the table,
Vogue
and
Flair
and
The New Yorker, Harper’s
and
Holiday
and
True Romances;
all the current movie fan magazines, enough of them indeed to stock the periodical room of a fair-sized public library. As a last resort she probed beneath the cushions of the couch and chairs, coming up with eighty cents in change, a twenty-five-centavo piece, a smashed liqueur chocolate and a single copper-jacketed cartridge which she fancied must fit a small-caliber gun, such as a .28. This, as everything, she left as it was.

The birds had flown, and there seemed nothing in the abandoned nest to suggest the probable direction of flight. Yet perhaps the simple fact that they had decamped at the first hint of an inquiry being made about them was significant. Why leave a comfortable haven like this? They were safe here on Mexican soil; they could laugh and snub their pretty noses at amateur detectives and, for that matter, at police and process servers, too.

Unless Dallas Trempleau was afraid that little Ina would weaken under pressure. She must be determined, of course, to keep the younger girl down here until after Junior Gault’s trial, which couldn’t be postponed forever. There might be some point, Miss Withers decided, in getting Ina alone sometime and pointing out to her a few of the facts of life about murder—and murderers.

The schoolteacher realized that from the point of view of the room clerk she must be taking a rather long time to decide about whether or not she wanted the place. She snapped out of her musings and went hastily back to turn off the bedroom light. Standing in the middle of the room to have one last look around, suddenly she heard a brisk tattoo at the front door and the sound of its being thrown open. “Comes trouble,” murmured Miss Withers under her breath. Her five dollars’ worth was evidently up. “Yes?” she called out.

“Come out, my beautifuls, wherever you are!” It was a man’s voice, young and strong and musical. “Look, my ball-and-chain-to-be had to start back to Hollywood because she has a story conference early tomorrow morning, and see what she has left behind!” He was a tall, beautiful, lightly-bronzed young man, wearing a frantic Hawaiian shirt, English flannel slacks, and red sandals. In each hand he carried a large green bottle. The smile on his classic features froze there as Miss Withers suddenly appeared in the doorway. “Who’re you?” he demanded suspiciously. “And where are the girls?”

“I am all the girls there are,” Miss Withers said crisply. Then she noticed that there was another man behind the first intruder, an older, less beautiful character in a sober blue-serge suit. He was obviously Mexican, with Indian cheekbones and an old-world beak of a nose.

“Sorry,” said the young man in the fancy shirt. “Wrong room. We were looking for Dallas and Ina….”

“It happens to be the right room,” said Miss Withers. “But no girls. My—my nieces seem to have suddenly moved out. But don’t be in a hurry, young man. If you’re a friend of theirs, perhaps you can suggest where to find them?”

The colorful youth, it developed, was not only a bosom friend but a next-door neighbor. He introduced himself, with professionally charming manners, as one Nikki Braggioli. His companion was Ramón something-or-other….

“Ramón Julio Guzman y Villalobos, Lic., Investigationes Privados,” was the legend on his card, with an address on the Calle Augustin Melgar. He was charmed to make the acquaintance of the Señora—sorry,
Señorita
Withers—and after a quick but searching glance around the room he sat down on the edge of a leather chair, obviously alert and ready to rise again at any moment.

But Miss Withers had set about cultivating them both shamelessly. It was not too difficult to pump Nikki—he was friendly as a puppy. Or perhaps a kitten would have been more apt as a comparison, for he was filled with an innocent selfishness. In ten minutes the schoolteacher learned that he was the son of an Italian father and an English mother, educated at a public school in Surrey but caught by the war in his native land. He had managed to avoid active participation in Mussolini’s youth movements, but after the war and the invasion of Italy by American motion-picture companies he had been chosen to play a bit part in Paradox’s mammoth “Hannibal at the Gates,” the eight-million-dollar epic they had recently shot on location in Rome. There he had met and wooed or been wooed by the coauthor of the screenplay, Mary May Dee, who had had to return to Hollywood when the picture was in the can, but who had arranged for his flying across the Atlantic and who now drove down every week end to be with him. He himself would have to remain here until his number came up on the quota, after which would ring out the wedding bells. Too bad he had missed a chance to try out for the part of Valentino in the screen biography, but there would be other parts, and with his future wife’s influence. “You have heard of her, of course?”

“Of course,” admitted Miss Withers, trying hard. She never noticed the names of writers on the screen. There had been her own brief whirl in Hollywood, as technical adviser on the life of Lizzie Borden, but that had been many years ago. Since then Paradox Studios had probably changed ownership, management, all of its writers and everything except its ingénues and the plots of its pictures.

With an effort the schoolteacher managed to get the conversation back on the track, but Nikki’s mind seemed to be a perfect blank on the question of where the missing girls might be. They had, he implied, been simply delightful neighbors and companions for going places. On the Trempleau pocketbook, Miss Withers presumed; this orchid man was purely a decorative, parasitic growth. “We had much fun,” Nikki admitted wistfully. “They love to gamble.”

That much Miss Withers would readily concede. One of them at least was gambling for high and dangerous stakes.

“What else would
Norteamericanas
come down here for?” put in the older man suddenly. His jet eyes sparkled, his sardonic mouth tightened into a wry smile. “They come here only to gamble, to marry or divorce or get drunk.”

A brief silence, tactfully covered by Nikki’s saying, “Perhaps then the young ladies go home? Why not? To me—to most Europeans today at least, it seems strange why people who can live in the United States ever go anywhere else.”

“There are other good places to live besides in the Colossus of the North,” pronounced Señor Guzman sententiously. “And speaking of going home—” He rose.

“An excellent idea,” agreed Miss Withers. She ushered her callers gently but firmly out of the place and locked the door carefully. After pausing at the desk in the lobby to return the key and to explain that she would like to think it over and make up her mind about the suite, she hurried out to the rented coupe and Talley. On the sidewalk was Señor Guzman, looking vainly for a taxicab.

“May I give you a lift?” she wanted to know. “I’m going right through town….”

He bowed stiffly, and consented to embark. Talleyrand had awakened and greeted the stranger as he greeted all strangers, with great enthusiasm. He was rebuffed. “In my country,” said Guzman by way of apology, “we do not sentimentalize over dogs.”

“Nor over any animals, especially bulls,” said Miss Withers, but to herself. “Tell me,” she said casually. “How long has Mary May Dee been paying you to keep an eye on her handsome young fiancé?”

He said, “But I do not understand.”

“Aren’t you, according to your business card, a private detective?”

Guzman produced another card, with slightly different lettering. “I am also a licensed
abogado,
a member of the bar.”

“I knew it! There is
something
distinguished about you lawyers—”

It was laid on with a trowel, but he softened perceptibly. “Mary May Dee is a client of mine,” he said. “I have secured several divorces for her, but she has not hired me to watch over her intended. As a matter of fact—”

Miss Withers had long held a private opinion that “as a matter of fact,” like “really and truly,” usually meant the exact opposite, but she did not say so. He went on, “I was only introduced to Nikki Braggioli yesterday, when we met in a bar. Miss Dee introduced us, and he seized the opportunity, when she was out of the room, to tell me that he had American friends, beautiful neighbors, who were in some sort of difficulties and who had asked him if he knew someone experienced and discreet who knew about criminology and detective work. I explained that I had some slight experience in the field, and he promised to take the first opportunity to introduce me, which happened to be this evening—or so we thought.”

Surprised, the schoolteacher cut the throttle a little. If the girls had been looking for a private detective, then they must have been afraid of something. That might even explain the cartridge in the chair cushion. “I don’t suppose, Señor Guzman, that you were advised of what it was that my—my nieces were worried about?”

Inside the dark and moving car she could not clearly see his face, and his voice was without expression. “I was not, señorita. I have no idea what they wanted. Now they have gone, and I have wasted an evening.”

They were now coming back into the business section of the town. “You are so busy, then?”

“Señorita,” he told her soberly, “on a good night sometimes I marry and divorce half a dozen couples, at a very comfortable fee.”

She jammed the brakes. “Don’t tell me you are a judge
too?
”

“No, no judge. You do not understand. If anybody really wants to get married here, they must wait three days and go through the usual formalities. If they want a divorce they have to have witnesses and appear in court. But for Americans we have a special deal. They merely sign a marriage or divorce paper, which later I mail to Chihuahua, where maybe later the paid proxies appear in court and complete the proceedings—if my esteemed fellow-counselors do not forget about the whole thing or mislay the papers. In any case the
Yanquis
think they are legally married or divorced as the case may be, which is the important thing, no?”

“No,” said Miss Withers firmly. “A thing is either true or it isn’t. You sound very bitter, Mr. Guzman.”

“Who would not be?” The lawyer-detective waved his hand at the Avenida before them. “Thousands of your countrymen pour across the border every day. They laugh at our quaint customs, our funny accents. They pay too much for our poorest liquor and our cheapest curios, and too little for our unfortunate girls. The great city of San Diego, of which we are a suburb, a convenient outhouse, boasts with literal truth that it has no slums, no gambling hells, no red-light district. We here in Tijuana fill that place….” He caught himself. “But you must excuse the sermon. I sincerely hope, señorita, that you locate your missing
nieces
and take them back with you where they belong before they get into trouble down here.”

“Perhaps,” admitted Miss Withers, “it is already a little late for that. I may eventually have to avail myself of your professional services. You will be in your office tomorrow?” Stopping at his direction outside a garishly illuminated little office building just off the avenue, she accepted dry, waspish thanks and watched him disappear inside.

“Dear me!” murmured the schoolteacher. Thoughtfully she wound the little rented car through the still-rushing traffic. The flood of American cars had turned, and soon Miss Withers found herself caught in a sort of riptide, almost fender to fender and bumper to bumper with three lanes of homeward-bound autos, whose drivers seemed weary and nervous and apt to lean on their horns. She inched slowly across the bridge and eventually up to the wide gates. Ahead of her the customs and immigration officials were stopping each car. One in every five or six had to open its luggage compartment for cursory inspection. About every tenth car was thoroughly, meticulously searched. Glad that she had no contraband aboard, she moved up when her turn finally came. A patient man in the uniform of the immigration service wanted to know where she was born.