Next morning neither the cook nor Juan appeared at the breakfast hour. Then news came of the murder. Juan had been found just below the hotel in the bushes, hacked to death. The Indian woman could not be located.
The guest of last year, whom Jim had spoken to the night before, was heard to say the obvious: “I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the cook. They scrapped last night, and she slammed him with that machete once before, you know. Too bad, because she could wrestle up a meal.”
Kathy had nothing to say. Not until she and Jim were aboard the plane and flying north toward Mexico City. Then she turned to Jim and said, “Wasn’t it awful?”
Not looking at her, he lit a cigarette. “You mean about Juan? He had that coming, I think.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jealousy, of course. The cook was soft on him, but yesterday she found he’d been going around with another woman. One of the hotel guests. Lucky the cook didn’t go to work on her.”
Kathy had turned dead white. “How do you know all this?” she finally asked.
“Alfredo told me,” he replied, continuing the lie. Then he waited, for she had to ask, her woman’s curiosity greater than her fear.
“Did he say who the woman was?”
Her words were weighted, barely audible. They made Jim smile, and at last he turned and looked at her. “Alfredo didn’t have to,” he said slowly, watching her turn pale again. Then she raised her hand in a peculiar constricted gesture, as if to ward off a blow, and he laughed.
“You see, I knew all the while,” he went on. “And next time, if there is a next time, you’ll know what to expect.”
Morning Movie
by Muriel Berns
They were only young boys, she thought. They couldn’t really do any harm...
When Carol found there would be a twenty-minute wait before the next feature, she went downstairs to the lounge for a cigarette. No hurry. It was only a quarter past ten, and she had the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon to herself before she had to be at work at the telephone company.
The lounge was empty. She sank down in a big leather chair behind a bank of decorative ferns to straighten the seams of her stockings, pleasantly aware of the cool, almost caressing firmness of the leather through her thin summer dress.
It was good to get away from people and voices for a while, and when half a dozen teen-age boys came in, she knew a moment’s irritation. She flipped her dress back down over her knees, but the boys had not seen her. They glanced around, as if to assure themselves they were alone, and then sat down in a group of chairs on the other side of the ferns. They all wore leather jackets with chrome stars on the shoulders, and all except one of the boys were, Carol guessed, about sixteen. The other boy was no more than fourteen. There was an adolescent fleshiness to his face, and his large dark eyes had a sheen close to tears.
Carol had taken cigarettes and lighter from her purse, but now she hesitated. There was a charged silence on the other side of the ferns, a kind of ominous pause. She studied the boys’ faces. There were no smiles there, none of the expressions she might expect in a group that age. Almost unconsciously, she dropped the cigarettes and lighter back in her purse, and then sat quite still.
One of the boys, a little larger than the others and the only blond-haired one of the six, leaned forward and stared narrowly at the boy with the moist dark eyes.
“We’re waiting, Teddy,” he said softly. “You said you wanted a chance. All right. This is it.”
“I didn’t split to the law. Jesus, Rich, you know me better than that.”
“Crap,” one of the other boys said.
“Keep your lip out of this,” the blond boy said. “I’ll do the talking.”
“Listen, Rich,” Teddy said. “It was just like I told you. I didn’t show because the old man found out I was up to something. He busted a strap on my can and locked me in my room. How you going to beat that? How could I meet you guys when the old—”
“You’re off base again, Teddy,” Rich said. “Way off. We don’t give a good goddam why you didn’t show. All we want to know is how come the law showed. That’s all, Teddy. You try telling us that, for a change.”
Teddy moistened his lips, his eyes a little wider now, a little more moist. “Jesus, guys, I—”
“Hurry it up,” Rich said. “We ain’t got all day. Somebody’s liable to fall in here any minute.”
“I don’t know why they showed.” Teddy said. “All I know is the old man found that curtain rod I used to make a zip-gun with, and he figured how I was—”
“Look,” Rich said. “We spend two days working out a heist. We figure everything, every damn angle. We get so we know more about the way old lady Wimbert runs a candy store than she knows herself. Okay. Then, a couple of hours before we’re supposed to pull it, we find out we got to move the time up a couple of hours. So what happens? You say you got to go home a minute, but you’ll be right back. You—”
“Listen, Rich! You know I—”
“Just shut up a minute, for Christ’s sake. All right, so you go home. But you don’t come back. We figure to hell with you, and we fall over to the candy store. And what happens?” He paused, smiling a little. “Tell us what happens, Teddy.”
Behind the bank of ferns, Carol felt a sudden dull pain in her lungs, and realized she had been holding her breath. The big leather chair, so pleasant a moment ago, now seemed too chill. She glanced toward the door to the ladies’ room, and then at the stairway leading up to the lobby. But even as fear became her only emotion, she knew she could not leave the chair. She sensed the danger of it. These boys were like no others she had ever known. They were completely outside her experience, and it was as if a door had been opened to a world she had never really believed existed.
The dark-eyed boy’s face was sheened with sweat. “I tell you I didn’t split!” he said.
“How come the law was waiting for us in back of the candy store, Teddy?”
“I don’t know!”
“Sure you do. You know because you told them.”
“Rich—”
“Shut up,” Rich said. He glanced around the circle of faces and then spoke in an even softer voice. “So our club’s busted up, and we’re all on probation. The juve squad’s nosing around, and the first thing you know they’re going to smell out some of the other heists. The first time any of us spits in the subway, he’s asking for a fast trip to the coop.” He paused. “You’re a squealing, no-good son of a bitch, Teddy.”
One of the other boys gestured impatiently. “To hell with him, Rich. We got to get out of here before somebody busts the setup.”
“Rich, listen to me!” Teddy said. “You said you’d give me a chance. You said—”
“Maybe I was lying,” Rich said. “You ever think of that?” He shook his head slowly. “No. Any bastard dumb enough to split to the law is too dumb to think of anything.” He glanced about him at the others. “That’s it, guys. Let’s go.”
The boys, with the exception of Teddy, rose quickly. Teddy stared up at them, dark eyes enormous against the sudden pallor of his face. His lips moved, but there was no sound.
As the group moved toward the stairway, the younger boy’s chair was obscured for a moment. Several hands reached out as if emphasizing contempt, and then the group was on its way out.
Carol waited a long moment before she started for the stairway. As she passed Teddy’s chair, she could not resist a final look at him.
He sat with his head pressed against the top of the chair, as if he had tried to make his small body conform to the convex surface of the back. There was something strange about his eyes, she noticed, and then she saw the small yellow handle of the icepick protruding from his chest.