He shook his head. "No. That"s finished. Mr. Potter does his legal business through San Francisco, New York, and Washington firms."
"I guess he hates my guts-if he thinks about it."
Endicott smiled. "Curiously enough, he put all the blame on his son-in-law, Dr. Loring. A man like Harlan Potter has to blame somebody. He couldn"t possibly be wrong himself. He felt that if Loring hadn"t been feeding the woman dangerous drugs none of it would have happened."
"He"s wrong. You saw Terry Lennox"s body in Otatoclan, didn"t you?"
"I did indeed. In the back of a cabinet maker"s shop. They have no proper mortuary there. He was making the coffin too. The body was ice-cold. I saw the wound in the temple. There"s no question of ident.i.ty, if you had any ideas along those lines."
"No, Mr. Endicott, I didn"t, because in his case it could hardly be possible. He was disguised a little though, wasn"t he?"
"Face and hands darkened, hair dyed black. But the scars were still obvious. And the fingerprints, of course, were easily checked from things he had handled at home."
"What kind of police force do they have down there?"
"Primitive. The jefe could just about read and write. But he knew about fingerprints. It was hot weather, you know. Quite hot." He frowned and took his cigarette out of his mouth and dropped it negligently into an enormous black basalt sort of receptacle. "They had to get ice from the hotel," he added. "Plenty of ice." He looked at me again. "No embalming there. Things have to move fast."
"You speak Spanish, Mr. Endicott?"
"Only a few words. The hotel manager interpreted." He smiled. "A well-dressed smoothie, that fellow. Looked tough, but he was very polite and helpful. It was all over in no time."
"I had a letter from Terry. I guess Mr. Potter would know about it. I told his daughter, Mrs. Loring. I showed it to her. There was a portrait of Madison in it."
"A what?"
"Five-thousand-dollar bill."
He raised his eyebrows. "Really. Well, he could certainly afford it. His wife gave him a cool quarter of a million the second time they were married. I"ve an idea he meant to go to Mexico to live anyhow-quite apart from what happened. I don"t know what happened to the money. I wasn"t in on that."
"Here"s the letter, Mr. Endicott, if you care to read it."
I took it out and gave it to him. He read it carefully, the way lawyers read everything. He put it down on the desk and leaned back and stared at nothing.
"A little literary, isn"t it?" he said quietly. "I wonder why he did it."
"Killed himself, confessed, or wrote me the letter?"
"Confessed and killed himself, of course," Endicott said sharply. "The letter is understandable. At least you got a reasonable recompense for what you did for him-and since."
"The mailbox bothers me," I said. "Where he says there was a mailbox on the street under his window and the hotel waiter was going to hold his letter up before he mailed it, so Terry could see that it was mailed."
Something in Endicott"s eyes went to sleep. "Why?" he asked indifferently. He picked another of his filtered cigarettes out of a square box. I held my lighter across the desk for him.
"They wouldn"t have one in a place like Otatoclan," I said.
"Go on."
"I didn"t get it at first. Then I looked the place up. It"s a mere village. Population say ten or twelve thousand. One street partly paved. The jefe has a Model A Ford as an official car. The post office is in the corner of a store, the chanceria, the butcher shop. One hotel, a couple of cantinas, no good roads, a small airfeld. There"s hunting around there in the mountains-lots of it. Hence the airfield. Only decent way to get there."
"Go on I know about the hunting."
"So there"s a mailbox on the street. Like there"s a race course and a dog track and a golf course and a jai alai fronton and park with a colored fountain and a bandstand."
"Then he made a mistake," Endicott said coldly. "Perhaps it was something that looked like a mailbox to him-say a trash receptacle."
I stood up. I reached for the letter and refolded it and put it back in my pocket.
"A trash receptacle," I said. "Sure, that"s it. Painted with the Mexican colors, green, white, red, and a sign on it stenciled in large clear print: KEEP OUR CITY CLEAN. In Spanish, of course. And lying around it seven mangy dogs."
"Don"t get cute, Marlowe."
"Sorry if I let my brains show. Another small point I have already raised with Randy Starr. How come the letter got mailed at all? According to the letter the method was prearranged. So somebody told him about the mailbox. So somebody lied. So somebody mailed the letter with five grand in it just the same. Intriguing, don"t you agree?"
He puffed smoke and watched it float away.
"What"s your conclusion-and why ring Starr in on it?"
"Starr and a heel named Menendez, now removed from our midst, were pals of Terry"s in the British Army. They are wrong gees in a way-I should say in almost every way-but they still have room for personal pride and so on. There was a cover-up here engineered for obvious reasons. There was another sort of cover-up in Otatoclan, for entirely different reasons."
"What"s your conclusion?" he asked me again and much more sharply.
"What"s yours?"
He didn"t answer me. So I thanked him for his time and left.
He was frowning as I opened the door, but I thought it was an honest frown of puzzlement. Or maybe he was trying to remember how it looked outside the hotel and whether there was a mailbox there.
It was another wheel to start turning-no more. It turned for a solid month before anything came up.
Then on a certain Friday morning I found a stranger waiting for me in my office. He was a well-dressed Mexican or Suramericano of some sort. He sat by the open window smoking a brown cigarette that smelled strong. He was tall and very slender and very elegant, with a neat dark mustache and dark hair, rather longer than we wear it, and a fawn-colored suit of some loosely woven material. He wore those green sungla.s.ses. He stood up politely.
"Senor Marlowe?"
"What can I do for you?"
He handed me a folded paper. "Un aviso de parte del Senor Starr en Las Vegas, senor. Habla Usted Espanol?"
"Yeah, but not fast. English would be better."
"English then," he said. "It is all the same to me."
I took the paper and read it. "This introduces Cisco Maioranos, a friend of mine. I think he can fix you up. S."
"Let"s go inside, Senor Maioranos," I said.
I held the door open for him. He smelled of perfume as he went by. His eyebrows were awfully d.a.m.ned dainty too. But he probably wasn"t as dainty as he looked because there were knife scars on both sides of his face.
FIFTY-TWO.
He sat down in the customer"s chair and crossed his knees. "You wish certain information about Senor Lennox, I am told."
"The last scene only."
"I was there at the time, senor. I had a position in the hotel." He shrugged. "Unimportant and of course temporary. I was the day clerk." He spoke perfect English but with a Spanish rhythm. Spanish-American Spanish that is-has a definite rise and fall which to an American ear seems to have nothing to do with the meaning. It"s like the swell of the ocean.
"You don"t look the type," I said.
"One has difficulties."
"Who mailed the letter to me?"
He held out a box of cigarettes. "Try one of these."
I shook my head. "Too strong for me. Colombian cigarettes I like. Cuban cigarettes are murder."
He smiled faintly, lit another pill himself, and blew smoke. The guy was so G.o.ddam elegant he was beginning to annoy me.
"I know about the letter, senor. The mozo was afraid to go up to the room of this Senor Lennox after the guarda was posted. The cop or d.i.c.k, as you say. So I myself took the letter to the correo. After the shooting, you understand."
"You ought to have looked inside. It had a large piece of money in it."
"The letter was sealed," he said coldly. "El honor no se mueve de lado como los congrejos. That is, honor does not move sidewise like a crab, senor."
"My apologies. Please continue."
"Senor Lennox had a hundred-peso note in his left hand when I went into the room and shut the door in the face of the guarda. In his right hand was a pistol. On the table before him was the letter. Also another paper which I did not read. I refused the note."
"Too much money," I said, but he didn"t react to the sarcasm.
"He insisted. So I took the note finally and gave it to the mozo later. I took the letter out under the napkin on the tray from the previous service of coffee. The d.i.c.k looked hard at me. But he said nothing. I was halfway down the stairs when I heard the shot. Very quickly I hid the letter and ran back upstairs. The d.i.c.k was trying to kick the door open. I used my key. Senor Lennox was dead."
He moved his fingertips gently along the edge of the desk and sighed. "The rest no doubt you know."
"Was the hotel full?"
"Not full, no. There were half a dozen guests."
"Americans?"
"Two Americanos del Norte. Hunters."
"Real Gringos or just transplanted Mexicans?"
He drew a fingertip slowly along the fawn-colored cloth above his knee. "I think one of them could well have been of Spanish origin. He spoke border Spanish. Very inelegant."
"They go near Lennox"s room at all?"
He lifted his head sharply but the green cheaters didn"t do a thing for me. "Why should they, senor?"
I nodded. "Well, it was d.a.m.n nice of you to come in here and tell me about it, Senor Maioranos. Tell Randy I"m ever so grateful, will you?"
"No hay de que, senor. It is nothing."
"And later on, if he has time, he could send me somebody who knows what he is talking about."
"Senor?" His voice was soft, but icy. "You doubt my word?"
"You guys are always talking about honor. Honor is the cloak of thieves-sometimes. Don"t get mad. Sit quiet and let me tell it another way."
He leaned back superciliously.
"I"m only guessing, mind. I could be wrong. But I could be right too. These two Americanos were there for a purpose. They came in on a plane. They pretended to be hunters. One of them was named Menendez, a gambler. He registered under some other name or not. I wouldn"t know. Lennox knew they were there. He knew why. He wrote me that letter because he had a guilty conscience. He had played me for a sucker and he was too nice a guy for that to rest easy on him. He put the bill-five thousand dollars it was-in the letter because he had a lot of money and he knew I hadn"t. He also put in a little off-beat hint which might or might not register. He was the kind of guy who always wants to do the right thing but somehow winds up doing something else. You say you took the letter to the correo. Why didn"t you mail it in the box in front of the hotel?"
"The box senor?"
"The mailbox. The cajon cartero, you call it, I think."
He smiled. "Otatoclan is not Mexico City, senor. It is a very primitive place. A street mailbox in Otatoclan? No one there would understand what it was for. No one would collect letters from it."
I said: "Oh. Well, skip it. You did not take any coffee on any tray up to Senor Lennox"s room, Senor Maioranos. You did not go into the room past the d.i.c.k. But the two Americanos did go in. The d.i.c.k was fixed, of course. So were several other people. One of the Americanos slugged Lennox from behind. Then he took the Mauser pistol and opened up one of the cartridges and took out the bullet and put the cartridge back in the breech. Then he put this gun to Lennox"s temple and pulled the trigger. It made a nasty-looking wound, but it did not kill him. Then he was carried out on a stretcher covered up and well hidden. Then when the American lawyer arrived, Lennox was doped and packed in ice and kept in a dark corner of the carpinteria where the man was making a coffin. The American lawyer saw Lennox there, he was ice-cold, in a deep stupor, and there was a b.l.o.o.d.y blackened wound in his temple. He looked plenty dead. The next day the coffin was buried with stones in it. The American lawyer went home with the fingerprints and some kind of doc.u.ment which was a piece of cheese. How do you like that, Senor Maioranos?"
He shrugged. "It would be possible, senor. It would require money and influence. It would be possible, perhaps, if this Senor Menendez was closely related to important people in Otatoclan, the alcalde, the hotel proprietor and so on."
"Well, that"s possible too. It"s a good idea. It would explain why they picked a remote little place like Otatoclan."
He smiled quickly. "Then Senor Lennox may still be alive, no?"
"Sure. The suicide had to be some kind of fake to back up the confession. It had to be good enough to fool a lawyer who had been a District Attorney, but it would make a very sick monkey out of the current D.A. if it backfired. This Menendez is not as tough as he thinks he is, but he was tough enough to pistol-whip me for not keeping my nose clean. So he had to have reasons. If the fake got exposed, Menendez would be right in the middle of an international stink. The Mexicans don"t like crooked police work any more than we do."
"All that is possible, senor, as I very well know. But you accused me of lying. You said I did not go into the room where Senor Lennox was and get his letter."
"You were already in there, chum-writing the letter."
He reached up and took the dark gla.s.ses off. n.o.body can change the color of a man"s eyes.
"I suppose it"s a bit too early for a gimlet," he said.