This barber, once he overcame his surprise at having a well-dressed Americano for a customer, and once he discovered that Quincannon spoke passable Spanish, proved to be no exception to the rule. His name, he said, was Enrico Garcia. And while he trimmed Quincannon's hair and beard he obligingly answered the questions he was asked about Luis Cordova.
Cordova had operated his dry-goods store at its present location for many years and had lived above it just as long. His widowed and aged mother had lived with him until her death two years ago; he had never married. He was a private man with no close friends in the community, and as such he seldom talked about his background. Garcia thought he had come from the Mexican state of Oaxaca but was not positive. When he spoke of Cordova as a “shrewd businessman,” Quincannon took the opportunity to ask if this meant the storekeeper was perhaps a shade dishonest. Garcia's reaction was one of shock. “Oh no, senor,” he said. “No. Luis is very religious. He would do nothing to offend God.”
He wouldn't, eh? Quincannon thought. Well, that remains to be proved.
He presented the barber with a generous tip and departed neatly trimmed and reeking of bay rum but with little more useful information about Luis Cordova than he'd taken in with him. He was of a mind to find out what other neighborhood residents thought of Cordova, but that intention changed when he again rode past the dry-goods store. It was still closed, the CERRADO sign still in place. He halted in front and checked his turnip watch. After eleven. The store should be open by this time; odd that it wasn't. Had Cordova gone somewhere on an errand? Or had he simply gone-on the fly like a thief in the night?
He dismounted, tied the claybank, and went along the boardwalk to the outside stairs that led to Cordova's rooms above. He waited until a pedestrian and wagon passed and no others were in sight, then climbed the stairs quickly. The branches of the olive tree hung in thick profusion over the landing, so that he was half-hidden among them as he rapped on the door.
There was no answer. He waited for a time and then tried the latch; the door opened under his hand. A sudden feeling of wrong-ness came to him, followed by a bunching of the muscles in his shoulders and back. He drew his Navy revolver and pushed the door all the way open, holding the pistol up close to his chest.
It looked as though a small whirlwind had been unleashed inside the adobe-walled interior, leaving havoc in its wake. Tables and chairs were overturned; a small oil painting of the Last Supper had been ripped from one wall, a wooden crucifix hung askew on another; shards of broken glass and pottery littered the floor. A kerosene lamp on the mantel above a cold fireplace burned feebly, indicating that there was little fuel remaining in the fount.
Quincannon stepped inside, shutting the door behind him. The rooms were silent except for street noises that filtered in from outside. A pair of bead-curtained archways led to other rooms, one to his left adjacent to the fireplace, the other in the wall directly ahead. He chose the far one first, crossed to it on a zigzag course to avoid stepping on the broken glass and pottery. The beads clicked like the joints of a skeleton when he passed through them.
More havoc had been wrought here, in what appeared to be Cordova's bedroom. Down pillows had been slashed with a knife, spilling feathers that clung to every surface. The mattress had been ripped open to expose its straw entrails. Even some of the bed's leather springs had been hacked through, as if in a frenzy. Bureau drawers had been pulled out and their contents dumped onto the floor. The door to an old scarred wardrobe stood open, revealing a ragbag cluster of torn and wadded clothing within.
For a moment Quincannon stood narrow-eyed, studying this room as he had studied the other; then he backed out, made his way to the second bead-curtained archway. The room beyond, at the rear, was the largest of the three, covering the entire width of the building. It was semidark in there-rattan blinds covered its plate-glass windows-but Quincannon could tell that it was used as a study. He could also tell that it had been ransacked as thoroughly as the other two.
He moved to the nearest of the windows, edged the blind aside, and looked out. A shed, an outhouse, the rear yard and rear wall of a building on the next block-and no people within the range of his vision. He used the drawstring to raise the blind and admit enough light for him to see more clearly.
The room contained a desk, two overturned chairs, an ironbound steamer trunk with its lid open and some of its contents pulled out, a battered refectory table, and a fireplace with the still-smoldering embers of a wood fire on the hearth. Papers were strewn everywhere, along with ledgers and old books and a dozen other items. All the drawers in the desk had been removed and emptied and thrown into a broken pile in one corner. Quincannon started over to the desk, walking carefully-and then stopped after half a dozen paces, when the angle at which he was moving allowed him to see more of the space behind the desk.
The body of a man lay there, half twisted on his back, eyes open and bulging slightly so that they had the look of small boiled onions in the dim light. Luis Cordova hadn't flown anywhere in the night. He would never fly anywhere again.
Scowling now, Quincannon holstered his weapon and went around the desk, knelt alongside the dead man. There were marks on Cordova's throat, gouged half-moons where his assailant's nails had dug into the flesh; but strangulation, Quincannon judged, had not been the cause of death. There was blood in the storekeeper's hair, blood on the floor under his head: a shattered skull, like as not from a repeated pummeling against the floorboards.
The fingers of Cordova's right hand were closed into a fist, and between two of them a ragged triangle of paper was visible. Quincannon caught hold of the hand, found it limp and cold-confirming his suspicion that the man had been dead since last night, at least a dozen hours. He pulled the fingers apart, removed the tiny scrap of paper. He was about to straighten up with it when he noticed something else: a small, shiny piece of metal on the floor near one of the corpse's legs. He picked this up and then returned to the window, where the light was better, to examine both it and the paper scrap.
The piece of metal was half an inch long, slender, conical in shape, and hollow. He had no idea what it was-and yet, it seemed oddly and vaguely familiar. He studied it for several seconds, still could not identify it, and finally slipped it into his coat pocket. He gave his attention to the torn scrap.
It appeared to be the bottom edge of a letter or some other document-quite an old one, judging from the age-yellowed condition of the paper. It contained six complete words, all Spanish, written in a crabbed and perhaps hasty hand, for the letters were ink-smudged and not well-formed. On one line were four words, on the other, two-what appeared to be the last two lines of a page.
mas alia del sepulcro
donde Maria
Quincannon's scowl was now as ferocious as Chief of Police Vandermeer's. He put the scrap into the same pocket as the piece of metal and then, methodically, he set about gathering up and examining all the papers scattered on the floor. It took him more than an hour, and there was tension and frustration in him when he finished. The letter or document from which the scrap had been torn was no longer here, which meant that it was now in the possession of Luis Cordova's murderer. There was no question in Quincannon's mind that it was a vital document.