Till Death Do Us Part (3 page)

N
AVARRO
chuckled. I got the idea that he thought he was a great joker.

He said, “
Señorita
, may I present to you the
señor
Tomaso Blane.
Señor
Blane, the
señorita
Arden Kennett.”

He sat down at a small desk and opened a drawer. “And now,” he said, “if you will both excuse me….”

We took the hint and left. I was wondering just what Navarro planned to do with Pachuco’s corpse. Even in winter, it couldn’t stand waiting too long before being embalmed. But it was Navarro’s hotel. I decided to leave the problem with him. I seemed to have enough to worry about.

And right now my major worry was Arden Kennett. She escorted me down the hall and up the stairs and into a large room that contained double beds. It was next to my old room, which had made it convenient for whoever had moved my gear. My pajamas were on the bed farthest from the window. My suitcase and my extra suits were in the closet. My underwear and socks and shirts were in the dresser drawer. And snuggled right alongside my stuff was hers.

I said, “Our friend has a real sense of humor.”

Arden Kennett stood with her back to the door, hands on hips. I had to admire the figure she presented. It was disconcerting.

She said, “Strictly business, Mr. Blane.”

I said, “What we have to do these days to earn a
peso!
Do all your dancing engagements include this kind of sidelines?”

She just grinned at me, ruffled her mop of short, dark blond hair, and walked to her side of the room. She plopped on her bed, throwing herself like a rag doll and yet, somehow, landing with all her parts in the right places.

I took off my shoes and climbed onto my bed. Propping myself against the headboard, I lit a cigaret. I let my eyes droop half shut. I think better that way.

Arden Kennett said, “How can a private detective make a living when the police are down on him?”

I said, “Oh, they still send me business. But it used to be big business—insurance companies and that sort of thing. Now it’s tourists—lost cameras, misplaced children, however, I get along.”

“But you got along better before you had trouble with Pachuco?”

I said, “You seem to know all about me. I suppose Navarro told you.”

“Of course.”

I said, “Did he also tell you that I didn’t kill Pachuco?”

“He didn’t say,” she answered. “He didn’t seem to think it mattered.”

I thought, the hell it didn’t matter to Navarro. Despite his pretended indifference, he was itchy because Rosanne Norton had hired me to come here.

I thought about that some more. But I didn’t get very far. I had too little to go on. Or perhaps I had too much. I had Rosanne Norton of Norton Enterprises, Incorporated, and I had Julio Ricardo Fulgencio Navarro, who probably was Rio Bravo, Incorporated or otherwise, and I had Enrico Pachuco, erstwhile partner, now deceased. And I had Miss Arden Kennett, eccentric dancer.

I also had a job to do for Rosanne Norton and another job to do for Navarro, and I had the feeling that before long one of them was going to conflict with the other. An ethical detective is in much the same position as a lawyer when it comes to clients. He can hardly play both ends of a deal and remain ethical.

Arden stirred, interrupting my thinking. She got up and went into the bath. After a great running of water, she returned dressed for bed. She snapped off the overhead light and crawled in between the covers.

I got up too, took my pajamas into the bath, made a lot of water run, and came back. She was still awake, her eyes open and fixed on my bed. I climbed under the covers.

Up to now, her presence had rather amused me. But I found myself getting irritated. My most expensive indulgence had always been privacy. I said, “What’s to prevent me from getting up and walking out of here?”

“Me,” she said. “Good night.”

The curtains were drawn over the window but a light breeze was blowing them apart and letting faint light spill into the room. When my eyes had adjusted to the light, I saw that Arden had apparently gone peacefully to sleep.

I listened to the church tower chime a soft two a.m. I waited about another ten minutes. Arden’s breathing was soft and regular. I threw back the covers and slipped my bare feet to the rug. I went softly to the bath and got my clothes. With the same soft care, I padded across the room to the door. She had left the key in the lock. I reached out to turn it.

From her bed, Arden said, “Would you rather be shot in the right or left buttock, Mr. Blane?”

I went back to bed. I slept without any trouble at all.

• • •

Fronteras, Texas, is a nice town if you don’t mind heat ten months a year and part of the time the other two months. I minded it, but there was little I could do but sweat. With the winter thermometer at eighty-five, I took the bus across the river. The trip was a slow one, since we had to stop twice to satisfy customs and immigration men at either end of the bridge. But finally we arrived in Fronteras’ plaza.

The towns were very like one another, except that where Rio Bravo had a honkytonk section, Fronteras had a narrow-streeted area filled with adobe row houses. Here the majority of the Spanish-Americans resided. Beyond this area was the American town. Except for the plaza, it could have been somewhere in the middle west.

I strolled along Grande Avenue until I came to a small white stucco building with a big sign over the glassed front door. The sign read: NORTON ENTERPRISES, INC.

I stopped across the street and slightly kitty-corner to the building. Arden, who had followed a few paces behind, stopped too. We were in front of a drugstore window. I turned as if looking into it. She turned too.

I contemplated a jumble of hot water bottles, patent medicines, plaster casts of ice cream sundaes, and mechanical toys. I said, “You can’t come in there with me.”

“Why not?”

I said, “This job is going to be tough enough without my having to explain you too.”

“How’ll I know you’ll say what you’re supposed to?”

I said, “The same way Navarro will know. But he’ll get the information from me, not you.”

She said, “I don’t want you slipping out the back door.” She sounded genuinely concerned.

I said, “Honey child, if I’d wanted to shake you, I’d have done it before now. It’s impossible for one person to tail someone else even in a place this size—if the someone else doesn’t want to be tailed.”

I saw her reflection in the drugstore window. Her short nose had a tiny worry wrinkle right where the freckles went across. She said, “I know that, but I don’t know what to do about it.”

I said, “Relax. Go in here and have a cup of coffee or a nut sundae. I’ll be back.”

“Promise?”

I had to grin. She sounded serious in the way a little kid sounds serious. I said, “If we’re going to play this game without wearing us both out, well have to make a set of rules. The first one is to keep our promises. And I promise. Now you go in here and wait and make up the rest of the rules while you’re waiting.”

She brightened. “All right.” She trotted docilely into the drugstore.

I went across the street to Norton Enterprises, Inc. I entered a room that looked so much like a doctor’s outer office that I expected to see a sofa full of patients. The decor had that modern medical reception look about it. But there were no patients, and instead of the usual crop of well thumbed magazines on the end tables, I saw a stack of brochures.

I picked one up. It told me all about Norton Enterprises and suggested that I inquire about investing in them. Since there was no sign of Rosanne Norton nor anyone else at the moment, I sat down to find out how to double my money.

I discovered that Norton Enterprises was run by the widow of the founder, Chalmers Norton, that the present enterprises included a cattle ranch, six oil leases, a fruit and truck garden distributing company, a chain of small hotels on both sides of the border, a fuel oil distributing company, and a labor supply service.

The labor supply service business puzzled me until I came to a paragraph explaining it. I found out that it was a new way of saying employment agency. Only it was restricted, rather than general in the types of labor it handled. In fact, it dealt only with Mexican nationals who came to the United States to work in the various harvests. Farmers and ranchers from all over the United States sent in their needs. Norton Enterprises, Inc., “after carefully examining the facilities provided by the American employer,” contracted with their Mexican outlet for the required number of laborers. They then saw to all the necessary papers, helped clear the men and their families through immigration, and generally made themselves useful. Their fees for all this were paid by the employer, not the employee.

I was starting on that part of the prospectus describing the six oil wells when a door opened. I needed only a quick look to recognize the girl who stood there. Today she was wearing a light print dress and a secretarial air, but she was the same snub-nosed Mexican girl I’d seen with Nace the night before.

She said in passable English, “May I help you, please?”

I put the brochure in my pocket. “I’d like to see Mrs. Norton. The name is Blane.”

Close up and in a good light, she was cute. Not pretty, except as young girls are pretty because of their freshness, but attractive enough. Her face was a little too broad and her body a little too out of proportion—the breasts too large and the hips too narrow and the legs yet to develop—for real good looks. She was at the most twenty.

“One moment, please,” she said. She backed away and shut the door.

In a moment it opened again. She nodded to me. I followed her through a small office, obviously hers, complete with typewriter, filing cases, and the usual office litter. At the far side of the room was a door standing partially open. On this door, in large, easy-to-read gold leaf was the announcement:

Rosanne Norton, President.

I took a breath and headed for the deep freeze.

T
HE GIRL STOOD
beside the door like a well trained executive secretary. I turned sideways to go past her. She gave me a tremulous smile and a shy appraisal from large, dark eyes. I smiled back. She flushed.

I went into Rosanne’s private office. She sat behind a wide desk, looking as cool as she had in Mexico City, but today her suit was a lime green.

She nodded me into a visitor’s chair placed at a slight angle to the desk. I sat down. Rosanne said, “Ask any visitors to wait. I’ll be in conference until further notice. And close the door, Amalie.”

It was all very crisp and executive and without a trace of politeness. Amalie shut the door. Rosanne looked at me frostily.

“I found your boy,” I said. “And I don’t think you’re going to like what I have to tell you.”

She made no expression at all except to let her mouth take on that wary, trap-like expression. But it was hardly worth reporting to Navarro. I had the feeling such an expression was her natural state.

“Go on.”

I said, “I don’t know how much you found out about Pachuco, but presumably enough for you to come to me to learn more.”

She just said, “Assume I know nothing.”

I said, “He’s a bum. He’s a big, burly bully boy who thinks he’s a devil with the ladies, and sometimes is. He also thinks he knows more angles than a geometry teacher. He makes his living playing those angles. I found out that about him a little late,” I added.

She wasn’t interested in my problems. She said, “I’d like specific examples, not generalities.”

Her expression still showed nothing, not even polite interest. I said, “He specializes in what you might call quasi-legal blackmail. That is, he uses confidential information given him by his clients to blackmail those same clients.”

“That’s hardly even quasi-legal.”

I said, “The way he gets the information is legal enough.”

She wasn’t amused, just impatient. “What type of activity do you think he might be planning while he’s in Rio Bravo?”

I said, “I’ve hardly had time to formulate a guess.”

“You were hired for that specific purpose,” she said.

I could feel myself winding up, and when I was wound all the way, I just took off the brake and let myself come apart.

I said, “You come to me with an assignment. You give me practically no data. Then you ask the impossible. If you want specific information aimed at answering a specific question, you’ll have to come down off that damned pedestal you work so hard to balance yourself on and tell me what I need to know.”

She surprised me. She could have got up and begun a buck and wing routine and she wouldn’t have surprised me more.

She laughed. It was a rich, throaty laugh, all full of innuendo. And so was the way she looked at me from under long lashes. She stopped laughing, got up, and offered me cigarets from a fancy box. I took one. She held the lighter for me. Then she parked on one corner of the desk and swung a foot wearing a pale green shoe and a dusky nylon stocking. Her smile was generous; it promised me everything. Everything but money, I thought.

This was such a thorough-going reversal of character on her part that for a moment I could only sit and suck on my cigaret and absorb an eyeful of neat leg.

She said, “You’re a man who doesn’t push easily.”

I agreed that I liked to think of myself that way.

She said, “I also assume you think of yourself as ethical.”

I said, “Despite what you might have read about me in the papers.”

She said, “I like a man with spirit. Let’s say that yesterday’s job was a test. If you’d come to me with a made up story of what you thought Pachuco might be up to, I would have assumed you were lying. As you say, you haven’t had time to determine anything.”

She got off the desk and returned to her chair. She kept the smile. She said, “I’ll begin at the beginning. Not long ago I received a phone call from Enrico Pachuco. He told me that he had some information I might find worth buying. From what you tell me about him, he was obviously beginning a blackmail routine.”

I said, “Did he say anything else?”

Before she spoke again, she hesitated. It wasn’t a long hesitation, just the kind a speaker would make while trying to organize his thoughts. But Rosanne Norton wasn’t the type who needed time to organize her thoughts. From what I’d seen, she was organized down to the last pedicured toenail.

The hesitation made me think she might be doing a little doctoring on her story. She said finally, “He refused to give me even a clue as to what information he had in mind. He did say that he would contact me again today. He hasn’t done so yet.”

I said, “So you wanted to find out just what kind of a man you were dealing with?” She nodded. I went on, “And you wanted to find out where he might be vulnerable.”

Her smile started to fade, but it rallied and held firm. “You might say that,” she agreed.

I said, “Therefore, I assume he has information you might find worth buying.”

The smile went fast. She tried to haul it back but couldn’t make it. Her natural disposition defeated her. She said coldly, “If you mean that I’m open to blackmail, the answer is no—except insofar as anyone in business might be.”

I acted as if she hadn’t turned off the heater. I said thoughtfully, “Let’s proceed from there, shall we? You have business interests which extend across the border. I can’t see Pachuco interested in any others. Is there anything about your hotels that isn’t aboveboard?”

“How could hotels be anything but aboveboard, for heaven’s sake?”

“Some of them might be high class call houses in disguise,” I pointed out. “And if the managers aren’t paying off to the right parties….”

She said, “I don’t own the hotels. My company simply has interests in some of them.”

That statement led me right where I wanted to go—to Navarro. I said, “Is the Rio Bravo hotel one of yours?”

“I have a twenty-five per cent interest.”

I said, “And the other seventy-five per cent belongs to Navarro?”

She said, “As far as I know.” There was nothing in her voice and nothing in her expression worth my noting. But this time her eyes gave her away. When I said “Navarro” I could see the veil drop over her eyes. She would just as soon drop Navarro from the conversation.

I said, “He seems to be quite the magnate in Rio Bravo.”

Her voice closed Navarro out. “He’s an excellent businessman.”

I said, “What kind of reputation does he have?”

“I’ve never inquired.”

I said, “But if he’s a kind of partner of yours, surely you know how he does business?” My naivete was hanging out for everyone to see.

She grew even frostier. “Since I can’t see how Mr. Navarro could enter into our problem, shall we talk of someone else?”

I said, “He might.” But she didn’t bite on that. I tried a different tack. “As a possible source of trouble, let’s say the hotels are out. But what of your labor agency? That has Mexican connections.”

She said, “I am exceedingly careful. Both the Mexican and U.S. governments are very touchy about the way the workers are handled. I’ve even lost contracts because I refused to supply workers to employers whose standards of housing or wages or food were not satisfactory.”

She sounded very righteous, very indignant, and very believable. I was sorry. I’d hoped to discover that I had an ogress on my hands.

I said, “Even so, something like that can be very touchy. If you trusted your Mexican partner too much and he did something illegal and Pachuco found out about it….”

I was inviting her to tell me who her Mexican partner was. I saw no reason for her to hesitate. It was information I could get easily enough. Still she did hesitate before she said, “That’s impossible. My Mexican partner is Mr. Navarro.”

I said, “Oh. Then you can’t think of any reason why Pachuco thinks he can blackmail you?”

“None.”

I said, “If that’s the case, you don’t need me any longer.”

She said quickly, almost desperately, “But I do, Mr. Blane.” Again, there was that slight hesitation. “I must know what Pachuco has in mind. There may be something I’m not aware of that he feels he can hurt me with.”

The desperation was a little out of character. Yet, she could be genuinely frightened. A business with as many ramifications as hers would hardly be easy to keep track of completely. I said, “All right. I’ll hang around for a while and see what gives.”

She said, “I’ll continue to pay you at the rates we agreed on.”

I got up. She got up. She smiled. It wasn’t quite as warm a smile as before, but it wasn’t frosty either. I waited. She looked at me blankly. I coughed. She said, “Oh, yes,” and got her purse and pried herself loose from a few more bills.

I was tucking away the money when someone tipped the outer office on its side and all the furniture slid with a crash to one end.

I got to the door and jerked it open. Rosanne was a bare half step behind me. I stopped and she stopped. Standing beside a desk that was no longer covered with papers or typewriter was the husky, hawk-beaked man I’d seen with Rosanne at Navarro’s, the one called Porter Delman.

And on the floor sat Amalie. A litter of papers and odds and ends from the desk surrounded her. She was crying silently and tears ran down her cheeks and dripped off her chin. She got slowly to her feet and I could see that the bodice of her dress was torn halfway to her waist. A bruise was forming on the side of her neck.

It looked as if Delman had used Amalie to sweep the desk clean.

I said, “Couldn’t you find someone smaller, buster?”

He hadn’t even noticed us before. He had been too busy glaring at Amalie. Now he swung his head slowly to focus his eyes on me. He had a thick neck and a wide pair of shoulders. He also had hard eyes. He was the mogul type, all right.

“Who the devil are you?”

I said, “The guy who’s going to bust you one if you just finished doing what I think you did.” I looked past him to Amalie. She was on her feet now, holding the torn top of her dress together with one small hand. She was still crying.

“Did he do this?”

She nodded. Delman took a half step toward her. “I caught her spying,” he said. He was talking to Rosanne. “She was listening at the door when I came in.”

“That is not true!” Amalie wailed. She couldn’t hold onto English at a time like this and she burst into Spanish. “When he came, I was picking up a sheet of paper that had blown to the floor. I try to explain this but he will not listen. He grabs me and shakes me and tells me I am a spy! And he hurts me so I will tell him who pays me! I cannot tell what is not true and he pushes me so that I knock everything from the desk.”

I said, “That was a real display of bravery!”

Delman turned on me, swinging a wild left at the same time. I caught it on the side of the head and my ears rang. He swung again but this time I was ready. I ducked under his arm and hit him twice in the middle. He wasn’t as hard as he liked to think. My fist went in quite a ways. He lost all his wind and backpedalled until the edge of the desk cut across his bulky rump and stopped him.

Rosanne said in a voice like a drill sergeant, “That’s enough!”

Delman was winding up to charge me. He looked like a bull, the way his feet pawed the rug. But when she spoke, he stopped cold. I had my fist ready. I dropped my arm. Rosanne had quite an effect on people. I was more than ever reminded of my seventh grade teacher.

Rosanne said, “Porter, wait in my office. And you, Mr. Blane, go about your business.”

I said, “I’ll see this young lady home first. She’s in no condition to work any more today.”

“As you wish,” Rosanne said coldly. She let Delman go into her office and she followed. The door closed sharply.

I said to Amalie, “Pin yourself together and let’s get out of here.”

Her eyes were wide as she looked at me. “
Señor
, you have just struck the most powerful man in Fronteras!”

I looked at the door Delman had gone through. I was wondering why the most powerful man in Fronteras would bother to manhandle a kid like Amalie.

Just because he thought she was listening at a door?

It was an interesting question.