Startled, he had looked up, and there she was outside the perimeter of light, no more than a dark figure. His glasses were for reading distance and in his surprise he hadn't taken them off, so he could give only a vague description. She spoke hurriedly and with a strange foreign accent on her English; she said she wanted something to protect her hat from the rain; one of his serapes would do, how much were they? The whole, queer little transaction happened so quickly that it was not until she was gone that Mr. Perez told himself it was surely odd, when she wanted to save her hat from the rain, that she had not naturally stepped over the threshold into the shop… "But no, she stays outside, she is really only a hand and arm reaching into the light, you understand?"
On hearing the price, two dollars, she held out the money, said any one would do, and he took it over to her. But she had forgotten the tax, the eight cents for the state, and when he reminded her she had impatiently handed him another dollar bill, said, "That's all right, don't bother about change,” and walked away rapidly. This Mr. Perez had not liked, because he was an honest man and also had his pride, and he did not like to accept tips like a waiter; however, she was gone-"and money is money.”
"That is very true. Was she carrying anything?"
Yes, she had had a suitcase; this she had set down a little in front of her to open her purse, and Mr. Perez had seen it a trifle more clearly than the lady. It had been an old brown leather suitcase. And the purse she was carrying, it had glistened as she opened it, catching the reflection of light from the shop-he thought it might have been of that shiny plastic, or perhaps patent leather, a dark color.
"And her hand-you saw her sleeve and hand?" Mendoza thought of Cara Kingman's silver-enameled fingernails.
Yes, so Mr. Perez had. A light-colored sleeve, of a coat he thought, but could not say whether a long or short coat-and it had a dark cuff, like velvet. As for the hand, the lady had been wearing gloves.
"Of what sort?" asked Mendoza.
"One small thing I can tell you about that," said Mr. Perez. "You comprehend, her hand is closer to me, and partly in the light, so I have a better look-for just that one small moment. She handed the money to me between her fingers, and then when I spoke of the tax, she reached into her purse again-impatient, you know-and held the third bill out on her palm, like so. Her gloves were a very light tan color, like raw leather-I don't know if they were leather or cloth-but they had buttons on the inside of the wrist, and when she held her hand out so, I saw that on that glove-her left hand it would be-the little button was missing."
A small amber-colored button in the loose earth raked over the corpse. " Diez millen demonios negros desde infierno! " said Mendoza.
"This does not, I fear," said Mr. Perez sympathetically, "please you to hear for some reason."
"On the contrary, it is very helpful indeed. But at the moment I don't know what it means-except that I have been wrong somewhere-or exactly what to do with it… "
Hackett's older sister had a couple of kids, and when they were smaller, a few years ago, once in a while he'd got roped in to sit with them, read to them. There was a thing the little girl had been crazy about, The Wizard of Oz; he'd read out of that one a good deal, and right now something in it came back to him. The way one of the wicked witches had just disappeared when she died-nothing left at all, because all there'd been to her was a kind of shell of malice.
He wouldn't, some odd superstitious way, be at all surprised if the same thing happened to Mona Ferne before his eyes. Maybe Mr. Horwitz took a jaundiced general view, but he'd been so right about this one. The front, and that was absolutely all…
"Such a terrible thing, I can't bear to think of it," she said in her light, sweet voice. "Poor darling Brooke. He did have talent, you know, he'd have done great things, I'm convinced-it's a tragedy for that reason as well as for all his friends."
"Yes, of course," said Hackett. "When did you see Mr. Twelvetrees last, Miss Ferne?"
She sat in the same chair her daughter had slouched in yesterday, but easily upright, gracefuclass="underline" everything about her was finished to a high gloss, from the lacquered flaxen coiffure to the fragile patent leather sandals with their stilt heels. Ten feet away, she looked an attractive thirty-five; any closer, no. All artificiaclass="underline" the smallest gesture, the tinkling laugh, the expression, the whole woman a planned thing into which God knew what minute calculations had gone. He didn't know much about such things, but he could guess at all the desperate, tedious, grim effort put forth-over the years more and more-on the front: the important thing. The massage, the cosmetics, the diets, the plastic surgery, the money spent and the time used, so much time that she'd had none left over for anything else at all, and so everything else about her had shriveled and died, and she was an empty shell posturing and talking there. All to preserve the illusion that was no illusion, closer than across a room. Any nearer, you saw the lines and the hollows, the little scars at the temples and in front of the ears, the depth of the skillful cosmetic mask, the little loose fold of skin at the throat, and the veins standing up on the backs of the narrow hands with their long enameled nails, their flashing rings, and the expensively capped front teeth, and the faint blistering round the eyelids from strain because she ought to wear glasses.
Those carefully made-up brown eyes widened on him. "Heavens, Sergeant, you can't think I had anything to do with-? No, no, I see you must ask everyone, mustn't you? Well, now, let me see-I believe it must have been that Thursday, the twenty-ninth it would be. Yes. Brooke dropped by and asked me to go to dinner with him, but I had an engagement already… I never could bring myself to believe it was so, what dear Martin thought-Brooke would never-I've been quite upset about it, but then all of us who knew him-and now to have this terrible thing happen! I've hardly taken it in yet, but I'll try to help you however I can-"
"Yes, thank you." This house, Hackett thought-something haunted about this house, with that great tree brooding over it, the rooms like caves until you turned on a light. But this wasn't the ghost who haunted it: the ghost was the other one… She had let him in-looking like hell again, today in an old-womanish gray cotton dress, ugly clumping shoes, her sullen face naked without cosmetics in the daylight from the door. Yet that clear pale skin-looking at her there, he suddenly saw that her eyes were beautiful, her good hazel-brown eyes clear as brook water, framed in heavy lashes. It was an oddly disturbing discovery, and almost immediately he'd made another which disturbed him even more.
And that wasn't his kind of thing, either-the intuitive understanding of emotional secrets. He was a cop, not a psychologist; his business, and one he was pretty good at, was collecting facts and fitting them together to make a picture. Mendoza was the one with the crystal ball….
It was the way she did it, the tone of her flat voice-turning to call up the stairs, "Mother!" All of a sudden he knew about this Angel Carstairs… You'd think she could do something, Mr. Horwitz said. I'm twenty-six years old and,… But she was doing something: the same thing she'd been doing, probably, most of her life. She was punishing Mona-for being her mother, for being what she was. And so anything Mona was or did or said, she had to go the opposite way-just to annoy. It was the negative approach, and also a trap she'd got caught in; because now for such a long while this had been the one reason for Angel Carstairs' existence, she couldn't stop and turn another way and go out to find life away from Mona. Maybe she understood that, maybe she didn't; either way she lived in a little hell she'd made herself, because every way she tormented Mona (reminding her with every mocking Mother of their ages, making herself the graceless ugly duckling in mute rebellion against the creed that beauty was the sole importance), she was tormenting herself too.