“See here,” growled Dwight, “I don’t like this.”
“Nor do I, Senor.” Michaela silenced the short man with a wave of her slender hand. “I think we will not talk of it until they are safely upstairs.”
Laura started to say something, but didn’t. Pasqual was pressing close to me and I felt the muzzle of his pistol prodding my ribs.
Michaela spoke softly: “You will go with Pasqual to the room, and no harm will come to you.”
I saw the uselessness of a further attempt at escape. With mock courtesy I offered my arm to Laura as we went up the stairway at the end of the hall, Pasqual close behind, holding a candle in his left hand.
At the top of the stairs he motioned forward with the candle and we went down an unlighted, bare hall with only the faint gleam to guide us. At the end, he opened a door and we went into a big square bedroom. Pasqual closed the door and a key clicked in the lock outside.
There was only the cold gleam from stars and a slitted moon coming through high barred windows to light the room. Laura’s hand dropped from my arm and she moved away from me. I stood just inside the door and said:
“This is a hell of a jam you’ve gotten us into.”
“Isn’t it?”
God! how I hated that woman’s self-control. I was pretty shaky inside, and I’m afraid my voice wasn’t wholly steady. She, however, sounded quite interested and amused.
There was the creak of bedsprings in the direction in which she had gone. I lit a cigarette and held the match high above my head. There was a four-poster bed in one corner, two straight chairs, and a massive chest of drawers. Laura was sitting on the bed, tranquilly watching me. The musty odor of a long unused room was suffocating.
I went to the windows and found them all tightly closed. I loosened a rusty catch and went to work on one, finally getting it open after barking my knuckles. The iron bars outside were heavy and solid. Directly below was the hedge, and I strained my eyes downward and made out a skulking figure beneath the window. It was Jerry Burke all right. He was looking up, motioning.
He moved away along the side of the house as I watched, and some of the empty feeling went out of my belly. If worst came to worst, I knew Jerry would take a hand.
Leaning on the sill, I breathed the first deep breath I’d had since entering the house, but it didn’t relieve the sick feeling that I had fallen down completely on the job Burke had assigned to me.
It was all Laura’s fault. I decided then and there that gallantry and sleuthing didn’t mix. Yet, I couldn’t put too much of the blame on her. By exposing me as an imposter she had simply rushed ultimate exposure. Dwight would have ruined things even if Laura hadn’t been along.
I stood at the window a long time before the thought struck me forcibly that Laura Yates might fit into the scheme of things in a terrific way. If she had murdered Young as Mrs. Young intimated, wouldn’t she pull just such a stunt as she did tonight? To throw suspicion away from her?
Whirling from the window, I asked directly: “Why was Young bringing you with him tonight?”
“Because I asked to come.” She spoke impatiently.
“Do you generally keep your dates under a cottonwood tree on rainy nights?”
“We agreed to meet there this afternoon... before it started raining. I came down on a bus from Juarez late this afternoon.” She paused, then went on coolly: “Mrs Young has a very jealous nature and doesn’t approve of me. Naturally, it was best for her not to know Les and I were meeting tonight.”
“You made the arrangement this afternoon? Where?”
“I don’t see how that can concern you.”
I didn’t tell her that it was going to concern the police. Instead, I persisted:
“What time did you see Young this afternoon?”
She didn’t answer for a time. I struck another match and started toward the bed. She was lying back as if she had suddenly grown weary.
“Well... what time?” I asked again.
She sprang up to a sitting position. “Why the cross-examination?” she flared. “It seems to me you’re the one who should be answering questions. Why are you pretending to be Les? Where did you get that note you showed the girl downstairs? What’s it all about?”
“Don’t try to be naive all of a sudden,” I grated.
She stood up and went to the window and I walked over and stood beside her. She was tight-lipped and quiet. Her shoulder was touching my arm. I was thinking hard about her heavily rouged lips, and about the rouge found on Young’s dead face and mouth.
Suddenly my hands gripped her shoulders and shook her. “You’d better come clean and answer some questions. This isn’t any time for smart repartee.”
Her flesh was softer under my fingers than I had supposed it would be. She let me shake her without offering any resistance.
The faint moonlight touched her face. Her red lips mocked at me and there was a gurgle of laughter in her throat.
“You wouldn’t be wanting to take... advantage of me... locked up in a place like this, would you?”
She was taunting me and I knew it. She was one of those women who recognize a man’s feelings before he, himself, is aware of them. Her words brought me to a realization that beneath my anger another emotion surged.
My fingers were tight on her shoulders, but I wasn’t shaking her any more. She was leaning back, laughing up into my face, a shaky, baffling sort of laugh. The pliant warmth of her body was pressed close to me, and her lips parted beneath mine in the semi-darkness.
Perhaps there is a psychological tie-up between the presence of danger and the sex-urge. Many psychologists argue that this is true. Explain it any way you want to... or let it pass... but instead of hurling leading questions at a woman who might be a murderess, I was holding her in my arms and kissing her — when a key grated in the lock.
The beam of a flashlight was on us before we were wholly untangled. Two uniformed Mexican policemen were dimly outlined in the back-glow of a candle. One of them spoke in broken English:
“You weel both come weeth me to ze jail in Juarez.”
Laura clung to my arm as I stepped forward and said heatedly: “You can’t arrest us. What the hell have we done? We’re American citizens and I demand...”
Both policemen held revolvers. “Eeet ees for murder,” the man continued. “For ze murder of anozzer gringo... Meester Leslie Young.”
7
Laura’s head snapped up and she gasped: “Leslie Young? Murdered!”
“Si, Senorita.” The Mexican nodded gravely while I wondered if she could possibly be putting on an act. If so, she was doing a good job of it, popping excited questions at the policeman to which he responded with a stolid shaking of his head.
Then they were herding us out and down the long hall to the stairway. Holding my arm tightly, Laura whispered:
“You knew about Les, didn’t you? How? Tell me what all this means.”
I concentrated on keeping my mouth shut and my eyes open. I wasn’t worried about the arrest, of course. Burke would fix that up with the Juarez police. But I hated to be hustled away from the hacienda with so many unanswered questions hanging fire.
I didn’t learn any of the answers on the short trip out to the front door, which Pasqual held open unsmilingly. The curtains were tightly drawn across both archways leading off the hall, and there was silence inside as we were pushed past.
Outside, I tried to argue with our captors, but Mexican cops are hell on wheels when it comes to carrying out orders. They hustled Laura into the front seat of the police car they had driven down, put me in the driver’s seat of my car while a cop got in the back. He ordered me to follow along behind the other car, and Laura leaned out to wave mockingly as they pulled away from in front of the hacienda.