Johnny's cab pulled up before the lighted canopy at the entrance to the Cafe of the Three Sisters as Consuelo Ybarra came hurriedly out of the door. “Hey!” he called after her as she started up the street without noticing him, and she glanced impatiently over her shoulder but waited while he paid off the driver and joined her. He pointed to the cloth coat over her street-length dress. “Where's all the fine feathers tonight?”
“I asked off.” She gestured at herself with a gloved hand. “Cinderella returns to the fireplace.”
He examined the ringed dark circles beneath her shadowed eyes. “What's gnawin' on you, kid? You look like an accident huntin' up a lawyer.”
“I'm tired.” She flared suddenly with more of her usual spirit. “Tired of being unlucky!”
Johnny cocked an eyebrow at her. “You're unlucky?”
“Desperately,” she said harshly. “All my life. Everything I attempt. I involve all my friends, and drag them down with me. I should be burned at the stake.”
“Why?”
But she as quickly withdrew. “It is not important.” She nodded at the door behind them. “Manuel is at the bar.”
“I didn't come to see Manuel.”
“I hope you didn't come to see me.” Her tone was grave. “I'm not proud of the other night, you understand. I haven't known men of your force of will, but I do not excuse myself. It is my penance that Christian lady and female animal are in too delicate a balance in my nature. I have much need of self-control. You hit an exposed nerve, but it will not happen again.” The classical features were almost school-girlishly solemn. “If you'll excuse me, I'm on an errand,” she continued. The full-lipped mouth twisted bitterly. “Of mercy, its necessity created by my greed.”
“I'll go with you,” Johnny said easily, and took her arm. “We need a cab?”
Angrily she flung off his hand. “Did you hear me? I won't have you trailing after me like a bitch in heat!”
He recaptured the arm, firmly. “Simmer down, kid. I don't need you in bed to like you. There's a difference.”
“There is a difference,” she admitted tiredly. “And I hope, if I had not sensed it, there would never have been the other between us.” She smiled at him somberly. “It's a cushion to bruised nerves to believe it, anyway.” She waved a hand ahead of them down the dark street. “I'm visiting the small hospital the mission sisters maintain. If such a place doesn't dishearten you, it's true I'm tired of my own company. We won't need a cab. It's only two blocks crosstown.”
She took his arm, and they walked in silence. The streets were quiet, the gutters filthy, the shop windows behind heavy steel grilles. In such a neighborhood, Johnny reflected, menace was a part of the atmosphere.
On the stone steps of the hospital building Consuelo took the lead, and inside the heavy doors Johnny's nostrils automatically tested the antiseptically deadened air. He followed left through the first door; the room was a small chapel, with tiers of candles burning quietly on low stands behind a wooden railing. He stood awkwardly as the girl knelt and, producing a coin from her bag, placed it in the offertory box. She lighted a candle, remained on her knees a moment with bowed head, then arose. They were in the outside corridor again before she spoke in the lowered tone the building seemed to require. “The hospital is so small that visitors are supposed to come singly, but I don't believe the sisters will question your being with me.”
He was beginning to second-guess himself on this trip; these places were just too damn depressing. “Who we gonna see?” he asked her as they passed half-open doors with silent rooms beyond. Consuelo turned toward the stairs.
“My uncle, of course,” she replied, surprise plain in her voice. She stopped in the middle of the stairs. “You didn't know? Rick said-” She looked doubtful an instant, then shrugged. “Never mind. Come along.”
He followed her up the circular, marbled stairs. In the upper hall white-faced sisters in whispering dark robes passed them on silent feet, and the fragmented murmurs of conversation that came to Johnny's ear from the partly opened doorways were all in Spanish.
The room that the girl turned into at the end of the corridor was like all the other rooms Johnny had glimpsed-boxlike, white-walled and dimly lighted. A plump sister rose from the single chair beside the high bed. “He is no worse,” she said gently in Spanish in answer to Consuelo's inquiring look. The calm, authoritative voice was not hushed, but it made no real impact upon the hospital quiet. The sister's glance took in Johnny at the foot of the bed, then returned to Consuelo. “If he should awaken, do not tire him.”
“ 'If he should awaken, do not tire him',” the girl repeated woodenly in English when the nun had left the room. “Three days in a coma, but I am not to tire him. He is no worse, which means he is no better.” She drew off her gloves, and her hands grasped each other with an intensity that whitened the knuckles.
She sank down after a moment into the chair the sister had vacated, and, from the end of the bed where he stood, Johnny looked down upon a shock of white hair upon the pillow and a hawk's nose above bloodless lips-and suddenly he understood a number of things. The man in the bed was Terry Chavez, who had been Charlie Roketenetz's trainer. And, by her own admission, Terry Chavez was also the uncle of Consuelo Ybarra.
He looked at the girl, who was trying to repress tears. “The way I heard it, this wasn't supposed to be serious.”
“He was improving, at first.” Her voice was only a murmur, and her lips drew back suddenly from even white teeth. “It was supposed to be a beating, a warning, but one blow too many or too heavy-” She gestured at the bed. “It's my fault.” He could see the flare of her nostrils as her voice strengthened. “I will swear an oath-if he dies, I will kill a man, and the man will not enjoy it.”
“Who's on your list?”
“Never mind.”
Johnny considered the firm lips and the small, stubborn chin. “Chavez knew the kid was going to dump the fight?”
She nodded. “It worried the boy, but of course it was one thing with which my uncle could not help. My uncle told Manuel. I overhead them discussing it as a matter of professional interest.” Her lips curled in self-scorn. “It took me to suggest that we get Rick Manfredi to capitalize upon it for us. It seemed so easy, since Rick would do as I asked, but from that point on everything that possibly could went wrong.” Her voice sank wearily. “The fight was supposed to end in the fourth. Nobody knows what happened, but they think now that the fighter was out to prove to himself that he could have won if they'd let him. He would go in the fourth, all right, but for three rounds he would fight. At the very end of the third round he very nearly knocked the other man out, and all through the next round had to almost literally carry him, with no chance to lose as he had been supposed to do. It was the sixth before he could find a way, and then very clumsily. It was too late for Rick's money, and the money which had fixed the fight. The fixers suspected Rick's knowledge and, I assume, backtracked from him to me and then to my uncle, who was beaten as a warning- Oh, I've made a fine mess of things!”
“They could come lookin' for you,” Johnny observed.
“God help the man who tries it,” she said soberly.
“All that remark proves is that you haven't wised up very much as to the kind of the people in this operation,” he told her impatiently.
“And all that remark proves is that you haven't wised up very much, as you say, to the kind of people I am.” She rose abruptly to her feet. “See if you can find the sister and bring her back. I can't do him any good here. It tears me inside to see him lying there, knowing it's my fault.”
From the doorway he could see the frozen intensity upon the beautiful face as she hovered over the bed. Maybe you've been underestimating the dynamite in that package, Killain, he thought to himself as he walked down the corridor in search of the nun. It might pay you to add a dimension or two to your thinking about Consuelo Ybarra.
On the way through the hotel lobby to the foyer, Johnny was buttonholed by Marty Seiden, the nattily bow- tied, red-haired, middle-shift front desk man. “Telephone, John,” he called from behind the registration desk, and Johnny grunted acknowledgment and swerved to the bank of house phones.
“Yeah?”
“Johnny? Can you come over to the apartment?” Sally's voice pumped adrenalin through his system momentarily until he realized that she sounded more puzzled than alarmed. “I wish you'd talk to this ridiculous man. He seems to think-”
“What ridiculous man?” Johnny interrupted her. “How'd he get in?”
“Why, I let him in, naturally. He's from the Treasury Department.”
