I frowned at the weapon for a moment, remembering a small girl with a dirty face, very shocked, telling me that, Heavens, she didn't know anything about guns! Now the same little girl had a.45 in her purse, a purse that was big enough to pack even larger artillery, say the Magnum variety. It had a husky shoulder strap to bear the weight. That way, even a small female person could lug around a heavy revolver without bulging in any unusual places.
I heard Beverly laugh oddly, and looked at her. "You men!" she said after a long moment. Her voice had changed. It was no longer helpless and innocent, but sharp and scornful. "It's really quite infuriating, dearie, the way you hulking males all take it for granted that nobody else can fire your big pistols and revolvers. But it certainly makes a fine cover for a girl who can stand a little recoil." She smiled at me crookedly. "Actually, the kick never bothered me much. It was the noise I had some trouble getting used to."
She was a little ahead of me. I'd figured it out only far enough to know that she wasn't the poor little victim of circumstances she'd wanted me to think her. She wasn't just another pretty Hollywood hopeful gone astray in tinseltown. I hadn't yet had time to do much work on the problem of who she might be, if she wasn't Mary Sokolnicek or Beverly Blame. I'd been sneaking up on the answer, after seeing the big pistol, but the idea she presented still came as something of a shock.
I whistled softly. "Don't tell me! It's old Santa Claus himself. I mean, herself."
She frowned. "Santa Claus? What does that mean. Oh, of course: St. Nicholas. Is that what you call me?"
"If that's who you are," I said, watching her. "If you're the mysterious Nicholas we've been looking for all this time."
"Why should you doubt it, darling?"
"Why should you admit it?"
"Why not? You have caught me. You have orders to kill me, do you not?"
"That's what the head man said. If you're really Nicholas."
"My actual code name," she said calmly, "is Nicole. We just changed it to Nicholas for one assignment, where it was important that I be taken for a man. We never expected that I'd be able to keep up the masquerade indefinitely, but somehow nobody ever caught on to the fact that Nicholas was a woman, not until Willy got careless and led that redheaded ingenue of yours, the one with the Irish name, straight to me. She knew enough, from her previous involvement in our affairs, to make the connection. I had to kill her before she revealed who Nicholas really was. There wasn't anything else to do."
"No," I said. "No, I can see that. It was necessary."
"Yes," she said softly, "necessary. So many things are necessary in this business, aren't they, Matthew Helm?"
She was still a little ahead of me. I should have known what came next, after the confession, but she got her hand to her mouth before I could stop her. Perhaps I didn't try as hard as I might have. After all, while Mac had said that retribution wasn't our business, he'd also said that there was no reason for the person responsible for Annette's death to survive.
She didn't.
XIII
Mexico boasts some very picturesque cities and towns, but Ensenada isn't one of them. Although it's within easy driving distance of the border, it lacks much of the stimulating, honky-tonk atmosphere of the true border towns. On the other hand, unlike some spectacular examples farther south and east, Ensenada displays nothing very interesting in the way of history or architecture. At least, if there were any ancient ruins or towering cathedrals around, they were well hidden from the main thoroughfare I used.
The impression I got was of a crowded, bright, busy, dusty community, peopled by dark-faced citizens who had their own affairs to think about and, for the most part, weren't tremendously interested in visitors from the north. Even the setting wasn't remarkable, since here the coastal hills had drawn back a bit from the sea, leaving the town sitting on a fairly flat piece of shore facing a large bay – the bahia for which, presumably, my hotel was named. I had no trouble finding it. As Charlie Devlin had indicated, it was right on the main drag. When I pulled up in front, a boy came out to help with the luggage, but he didn't seem very disturbed to find I didn't have any. Apparently the situation had arisen before, and he was used to mad Americanos who'd suddenly decided to dash down to Ensenada for a day or two with nothing but what was in their pockets.
At the desk, a pretty, blackhaired seсorita whose English was intelligible but far from perfect assigned me to a room and passed the key to the boy. He pointed out the bar and restaurant, and then led me down a long corridor and exhibited my quarters with a thoroughness, and a proprietary air of pride, that earned him a buck although he'd had nothing to carry. A reputation for generosity isn't a bad thing to establish in a strange foreign town; and actually it was a pretty good room, and everything worked.
Having made sure of this-Mexican plumbing tends to be temperamental-I went back out to the car and drove it around to the parking area behind the building. Before locking up, I carefully turned down both sun visors for Charlie Devlin's benefit: our prearranged let's-make-contact signal. In my room once more, I pulled off my shoes and lay down on the bed to wait.
It had not been my intention to do any heavy thinking. There seemed to be no constructive cerebration left to be done. To all appearances my job was finished. I should have been happy. All that remained was to buy my idealistic colleague a drink when she arrived, thank her for her help, wish her luck with her job, and wrap up the whole assignment with a report to Washington, where they'd complete the dossier on Nicholas and consign it to the permanently inactive file.
The trouble was, for one thing, I don't really like to see people die, and there aren't so many pretty, spunky little girls around that we can afford to lose one, no matter what her politics. Of course, personal likes and dislikes don't figure largely in this business, or shouldn't. More to the point was the fact that it had been too easy.
A good many years of experience have taught me to view with suspicion difficult cases that conveniently and unexpectedly solve themselves, and villains-or villainesses-who are obliging enough to kill themselves after kindly confessing their guilt. Anyway, the cerebral machinery kept spinning busily, reviewing the events of the past few days.
Lying there, I had to relive the whole affair, including the final ghoulish details involved in putting back into the sea, dead, the small female body I had so recently fished out of it alive. I hadn't enjoyed the task, but it had seemed like the logical solution. Mac had wanted it done inconspicuously, and with a little luck, this should be inconspicuous enough for anybody.
The authorities would find the wrecked car. Nearby, they'd probably find, washed up on the rocks, some scraps at least of the artistically tattered costume Beverly had thrown into the sea. They would assume that the dazed-perhaps hysterical-owner of the smashed automobile, stumbling about on the low cliffs in the early morning darkness, had managed to fall over the edge, and had then shed her hampering garments in her futile efforts to swim to safety.
A little farther down the coast, depending on the currents-I'd brought her back as near to the scene as I'd dared-they might or might not find the body. If they did, there would be no obvious signs of poison, I was fairly sure. She'd been a pro working for pros. What she'd used had been fast, effective, and undoubtedly reasonably undetectable.
A county coroner, or whoever performed the duties of that office here in Mexico, would be unlikely to spot it. I didn't think anybody would even notice that there was less water in the lungs than usual in cases of drowning. If they did, well, she'd been through a serious crash before she hit the water; she could have died as a belated result of internal injuries. Scratch one turista, possibly drunk, who'd failed to negotiate a curve in her expensive Yankee convertible.