The Knave of Hearts

The Knave of Hearts

Dell Shannon
1982

ONE

"So that’s all, enough! The same old
story—¡
siempre la trampa
,
sure! I’ll be damned if—"

"Oh, damn you and whatever you want to think—the
trap, always the same susp— And what makes you think I’d have
you?
¡A ningun precio
,
thanks very much. Get out, go away, I can’t—"

"
¡Un millón de gracias,
le deseo lo propio
—-the same to you!"
He lost his temper about once in five years, Mendoza, and when he did
it wasn’t a business of loud violence; he had gone dead white and
his voice was soft and shaking, and his eyes and his voice were cold
as death and as hard. "You—"

"Get out for God’s sake-
¡largo
de aqui!
—you can go to hell for all I—"
And she didn’t lose her temper often either, but it didn’t take
her that way when she did; she was all but screaming at him now, taut
with rage, and if she’d had a weapon to hand she’d have killed
him.

"
¡Rapidamente
,
anywhere away from you!
¡Y para todo, muchas
gracias!
" That was sardonic, and pure
ice; he snatched up his hat and marched out, closing the door with no
slam, only a viciously soft little click.

Alison stood motionless there for a long moment, her
whole body still shaking with the anger, the impulse to violence; she
breathed deep, feeling her heart gradually slow its pounding. And
now, of course, she could think of all she should have said, longed
to say to him. This cheap cynical egotist, only the one thing in his
mind—every obscene word she knew in two tongues, she’d like
to—she should have—

And then, a while after that, she drew a long
shuddering breath and moved, to sit down in the nearest chair. The
fury was dead in her now, and that was another difference between
them; it never lasted long with her. She sat there quite still; her
head was aching slightly, then intolerably—aftermath of all that
primitive physical reaction. The little brown cat Sheba leaped up
beside her, asking attention, purring; Alison stroked her
mechanically. The kitten he had given her, the only thing she had
ever let him give her.

And wasn’t he a judge of women indeed, that way,
all ways! It was even a little funny: one of the first things he’d
said to her after they’d met—" A respectable woman like you,
she’s so busy convincing me she’s not after my money,
vaya
,
she’s never on guard against my charm."

Ought to take something for this headache.

She got up, went slowly through the bedroom to the
bathroom, swallowed some aspirin. In the garish overhead light there
she looked at herself in the glass impersonally. Alison Weir, and not
bad for thirty-one either; her best point, of course, was the thick
curling red hair, and the fine white skin and green-hazel eyes
complemented it. You might think Alison Weir could do pretty well for
herself, even with that foolish too-young marriage thirteen years in
her past, and no money now, to count. The women you saw—plain,
dowdy, careless, and bitchy too—selfish and mean women—who
somehow managed to find men for themselves . . .

"Oh, God," she whispered, and bent over,
clutching the slippery bowl against the pain. The aspirin hadn’t
taken hold yet, but this was a worse pain than the headache.

It was true, of course. She had forgotten now exactly
what thoughtless little phrase had started the ugly sudden
quarrel—his sarcastic answer and her quick, angry protest fanning
the flame. But in essence, his cynical suspicion was true, how true.
Setting the trap, to have him all hers.

She could not face the woman in the mirror, the pale
woman with the pain in her eyes. She went into the bedroom and sat
down on the bed. But from the beginning she had known him for what he
was. Not for any one woman: not ever, apart from his womanizing, all
of Luis Mendoza for any human person. He was just made that way. Like
one of his well-loved cats, at least half of him always secret to
himself, aloof. And maybe all because of the hurts he’d taken (for
she knew him very thoroughly, perhaps better than he suspected, and
she knew his terrible sensitivity). The hurts he’d taken as a dirty
little Mex kid running the slum streets—long before he came into
all that money. So that he’d never give anyone the chance to hurt
him again, ever, in any way. Never let anyone close enough to hurt
him. She had known: but knowing was no armor for the heart.

There was an old song her father used to sing: one of
the favorites, it was, around the cook-fires in the evening, in every
makeshift little construction camp she remembered—always one of the
locally hired laborers with a guitar. The easy desultory talk after
the day’s work, sporadic laughter, and the guitar talking too, as
accompaniment, in the blue southern night.
Ya
me voy . . . mi bien
, I must go, my love . .
.
te vengo a decir adios
—I
have come to tell you goodbye . . .
te mando
decir, mi bien, como se mancuernan dos
—to
tell you how disastrously two people can be yoked . . .

What use had it been to know? It was all her own
fault. Maybe she deserved whatever pain there would be, was—she had
known how it would end. Quarrel or no, he would have gone eventually.
When he’d had enough of her, when he’d found a new quarry—when
instinct told him she was coming too close, wanting too much of him.
And she did not need telling that all this while she alone hadn’t
held him—there’d been others, for variety.

Toma esa llavita de oro, mi bien
. . . take this gold key, open my breast and you’ll see how much I
love you . . .
y el mal page que me das
——and
how badly you repay me . . .

And the time had come, and he had gone; she would not
see him again; the interlude was over. It was for Alison Weir to pick
up the pieces the best way she could, and go on from here.
Toma
esa cajita de oro, mi bien
. . . take this
gold box, look to see what it contains . . .
lleva
amores, lleva celos—y un poco de sentimiento
—love
and jealousy, and a little regret . . .

Shameful, shameless, that she could not feel any
resentment, any righteous hatred, that—for what he was—he had
left her to this pain. No self-respect as half—armor against it:
despicable, that she could summon no shred of pride to keep anger
alive.

It was going to be very bad indeed, somehow finding
out how to go on—somewhere—without him. That was no one’s
fault, hers or his. No one deliberately created feelings; they just
came. No one could be rid of them deliberately, either.

It was going to be very bad. All the ways it could
be, not just the one way. Because there had been also (would it help,
this objective terminology for emotions?) a companionship: their
minds operating on the same wave length, as it were.

"But I should be ashamed," and she was
startled to hear her own voice. "I should be ashamed—"
not to hate. She put her hands to her face; she sat very still,
bracing herself against the pain.

"Post-mortems!" said Mendoza violently.
"Religion! ‘Saved from Satan and thus confessing my sins!’ "
He slapped Rose Foster’s signed statement down on his desk. "What
the hell are we supposed to do with this?"

"Don’t look at me,” said Hackett, "I
didn’t handle the Haines case, and neither did you—by the grace
of God. All for the best in this best of all worlds, isn’t it?—damn
shame Thompson had to drop dead of a heart attack at fifty, but at
least it’s saved him from some rough handling by the press. What’d
the Chief say?"

"You don’t need the answer to that one,"
said Mendoza. "
Tomemos del mal el
menos
—the lesser of two evils. Nothing
definite to the press—no statements for the time being. Get to work
on it and find out, find out everything, top to bottom! But no
washing dirty linen in public."

He lit a cigarette with an angry snap of his lighter
and swiveled round in his desk-chair to face out the window, over the
hazy panorama of the city spread below. He didn’t like this
business; nobody in the department who knew anything about it liked
it; but he might not be taking it so violently except for that damned
fight with Alison last night.

He smoked the cigarette in little quick angry drags,
nervous. Women! There was a saying.
Sin
mujeres y sin vientos, tendriamos menos tormentos
—without
women and without wind, we’d have less torment.
Absolutamente
,
he thought grimly. Scenes like that upset him; he liked it kept nice
and easy, the smooth exit when an exit was indicated and that was
that. Usually he managed it that way, but once in a while—women
being women—a scene was unavoidable. He might have known it would
be, with Alison: not the ordinary woman. He was sorry about it, that
it had ended that way. Apart from anything else, he had liked
Alison—as a person to be with, not just a woman—they’d
understood each other: minds that marched together. But women—!
Always wanting to go too deep, put it on the permanent basis. Sooner
or later the exit had to be made. He was only sorry, hellishly sorry,
that this one had had to be made that way.

But it was water under the bridge now, and the sooner
he stopped brooding on it the better.

God knew he had enough to occupy his mind besides.

Abruptly he swiveled back and met Hackett’s
speculative stare. Art Hackett knew him too damned well, probably
guessed something was on his mind besides this business .... Hackett
didn’t matter. Hackett nice and cozy in his little trap, not
knowing yet it was one: Hackett two weeks married to his Angel, still
the maudlin lover.

He picked up the Foster woman’s statement again and
looked at it with distaste. I know I done awful wrong and now I been
saved into the true religion I want to clear my conscience once for
all . . .

"If that," said Hackett, "is so, it’s
damned dirty linen, Luis. And it can’t be kept a secret forever.
There was the hell of a lot of publicity over Haines, not too long
ago. It’d be news with a capital N—and when it comes to that,
would it be such a hot idea to hide it up, for the honor of the force
so to speak?" He shrugged and shook his head.

"That," said Mendoza, "is just one
unfortunate aspect. As you say, at least Thompson’s dead and
whatever they say about him he won’t hear. Also, he makes a very
convenient scapegoat, doesn’t he, tucked away underground? We can
always give it out the poor fellow was failing—all very sad, but
such things will happen, obviously he was prematurely senile and
didn’t know what he was doing. Which is one damned lie. And what
the hell is this worth?" He flicked the statement
contemptuously. "Sure, a lot of publicity—before the trial,
after the trial. A lot of people sympathetic to Haines and his
family, believing in him. Here’s a damn-fool female turned
religious fanatic—who’s to say she didn’t make the whole thing
up, just to get her name in the papers?"

"She had his pipe," said Hackett. “The
wife’s identified it."

"All right—
¡vaya por
Dios!
—the wife was panting to identify it,"
said Mendoza irritably. "Did she really look at it so close?"

Hackett got out a cigarette and turned it round in
his fingers, looking at it. "You taking the stand we can’t be
wrong? It happens, Luis. Not often, but it happens."

"
No lo niego
,
I don’t deny it. It happens. If it happened here, sure, the press
boys’ll get hold of it, and you know what they’ll say, what the
outcome will be, as well as I do. Stupid blundering cops—prejudiced
evidence—and the muddleheaded editorials about the death penalty
and circumstantial evidence!
¡Es lo de
siempre
, the same old story—
¡por
Dios y Satanás!
" He laughed without
humor.

"And bringing it up again," agreed Hackett,
"every time somebody we get for homicide looks wide-eyed at a
press camera and says, ‘I swear I’m not guilty.' You needn’t
tell me. But there it is."