She looked him over deliberately, then, surprisingly, reached out to pinch the muscle of his right arm.
“You are a powerful, powerful man.”
She started carefully along the paved cloister. She was wearing high heels, but she was so tightly girdled that the jolts had no sensuous effect. She went in under a stone archway.
Shayne followed. It was a sitting room, as gloomily furnished as the other rooms at the front of the house, but with one splash of color-a geometric painting in light reds and greens. Even before checking the signature, Shayne recognized this as one of the works of her husband’s mistress.
“May I offer something to drink?” Senora Alvares said.
Without waiting for his answer, she drew an open split of champagne from a silver ice bucket and filled two glasses.
“Champagne. I am not celebrating the bombing apart of my husband; this is the only liquid the doctors have let me drink in recent years. To you, sir. That you remain in your present state of health.”
She seemed to want to clink glasses with him, but he avoided that. She lowered herself into a tall-backed chair.
“I see you looking at my painting,” she said. “And it astonishes you, because of the relationship between the painter and my poor husband. Have you met her? A cheap woman, with such fraudulent hair. Unquestionably a talented artist, however, would you not agree? I have owned this painting and others, and I thought to hang them, to show Caracas that for my husband to fall between this woman’s legs was of no consequence to me. But in the end I was too frightened! Until this morning, when I called my little servant and we hung this one, to remind me of my great cowardice. It is valued at twenty thousand bolivars, those few simple shapes. Do you believe it? Some people are taking their Dantes down since the recent events. As for me, I am putting mine up.”
She drank deeply, set the glass on a low chest and looked at him.
“You are the famous detective who always captures the ones who do the murder.”
“Some of the time,” Shayne said. “On this one I’ll settle for getting Tim Rourke out of jail.”
She reached for her glass and Shayne watched her drink. There were two more splits in the ice-filled bucket, and he saw two empties on the sideboard.
“I’ve been talking to Miss Dante,” he said. “She told me about the plan to rescue your husband. I’d like to get your version of that.”
She blinked. “On the whole I think I should imitate your friend Mr. Rourke and stay silent.”
“That’s your privilege. I think I have most of it already, but naturally she told it from her own point of view. I liked her. Very juicy, I thought. That doesn’t mean I believed every word she said.”
The Senora drank, emptying her glass. “Believe every third word. That would be my piece of advice.”
Shayne opened another split and refilled her glass.
“How long have you known about your husband’s association with her?”
“From its beginning, I think. That has no significance. He has announced for many years already that he would do what he pleased, in the matter of who shared his intimate moments. But to become so much in the clutches of a North American was a mistake. His people ask each other, are there no equally juicy Venezuelans?”
“How much of the week did he spend with you?”
“All! There is a mode of behavior to be observed in a Catholic country. So he was with me every day for either dinner or breakfast, rarely for both. Why do you think this important?”
“I’m interested in a diary he was keeping at the end.”
He had noticed that whenever a question bothered or puzzled her, she drank before speaking. She reached for her glass.
“What is meant by the word diary? Something that is written from day to day?”
“That’s the idea.”
“Then you should ask that question of his mistress. Here is where he had his clothes washed, where he read his mail.”
“You never saw him writing in a little book with lined pages?”
She lifted her face from the champagne. “No, Mr. Shayne. I know nothing of any such book of that type.”
“You didn’t give Tim Rourke a page torn out of it, to persuade him to carry in those cartons of cigarettes?”
“No, no. I have no meeting with that person Rourke. When you speak of a diary, I hear about it for the first time.”
“Will you look around the house and see if you can find it? I might be able to use it to buy Rourke off. Then I’d go home and you people could work things out without any more interference from me.”
“But why would I care if you stay or go?”
“It’s a funny setup,” Shayne said. “The minute I showed up everybody started telling me things. That doesn’t always happen. I think it was to keep me busy so I wouldn’t stumble on something I shouldn’t be worried about, such as money.”
“Money,” she said vaguely, and drank. “The odds and ends he was able to put aside. I have heard this mentioned, but who knows how much or where it is?”
“Somebody must. How much luggage did he have with him when he left for the plane?”
“None. Look here, will you open another bottle? Those tiny thin things are not adequate for two persons.”
Shayne popped another cork and more champagne fumed into their glasses. She drank greedily.
“I was with him when he received the phone call. I know now it was the one that said all was over, resistance was hopeless. He was calm. If he had packed a suitcase I would know he was leaving. I might demand that he take me to safety. He merely said he would go outside to smoke a cigar in the garden. In casual shoes, not even a necktie. Presently I heard an airplane motor. Soon after that, a smash.”
“What will you do now,” Shayne said after a moment, “go home to your family?”
“I will make them move me out of this house bodily! One of their tame judges is even now preparing such a measure. If I had that diary you speak about, do you know what I would do? I would sell it. I am not a wealthy woman, far from it. If my husband had other sources of financing, I never saw or touched any of that. He made me a miserable allowance to run the household, and I had to go down on my knees and beg for such things as a new dress, a color television.”
“Lenore says you agreed to help get him out of jail because you thought it would pay off financially.”
“I did it out of softness! Out of sentimentality! Perhaps it occurred to me to bargain a little-if we succeeded, I would expect one third of his property, and that would certainly be fair because I was the one who ran the danger- but it wouldn’t be dignified at such a time. If she told you I said one word to her about money or shares, she is lying in her teeth! I was carried away with the idea that a wife should assist her husband in times of trouble. That has always been the rule in my family.”
“How hard did you try to get permission to see him?”
“I went from office to office. I talked to Mejia, the members of the junta, the judges of the high court. I persuaded Mr. Felix Frost, the most powerful man in the North American Embassy, to intercede on my behalf. But they are inhuman, they wouldn’t grant a wife the favor of looking at her husband for the last time. Politics turn men into animals.”
“Maybe they were afraid he’d manage to tell you where the money was.”
“I’m sick of listening about this money. Don’t speak about it any more because it makes me physically ill.”
“Did you have any contact with Paula Obregon?”
“No, only with the girl’s aunt. I have knowledge of her socially, you understand. Her parents have been to my table. But on this occasion, the one who induced me to make that fatal commitment was the Dante woman, and how coarse, how degrading to me was the moment of weakness. I put my arms around her, we shed tears together as we agreed to conspire to save the life of the man we had in common. But not so much in common, when you think of it. She had the person, the future, I had the empty title.”
“Do you have any idea how I can get in touch with the Obregon girl?”
“One day she will take one chance too many, and she will be captured. But until then-” She waved. “If there is no more champagne in the bucket go to the door and shout. They will bring some.”
