“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 dick 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 dick 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 damn 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 caja cartero, you call it, I think.”
He smiled. “Otatoclan is not Mexico City, senor. It is a very primitive place. A street mailbox in Otatodan? 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 dick. But the two Americanos did go in. The dick 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 carpinterla 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 bloody 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 document 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 to. It’s a good idea. It would explain why they picked a remote little place like Otatodan.”
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 glasses off. Nobody can change the color of a man’s eyes.
“I suppose it’s a bit too early for a gimlet,” he said.
53
They had done a wonderful job on him in Mexico City, but why not? Their doctors, technicians, hospitals, painters, architects are as good as ours. Sometimes a little better. A Mexican cop invented the paraffin test for powder nitrates. They couldn’t make Terry’s face perfect, but they had done plenty. They had even changed his nose, taken out some bone and made it look flatter, less Nordic. They couldn’t eliminate every trace of a scar, so they had put a couple on the other side of his face too. Knife scars are not uncommon in Latin countries.
“They even did a nerve graft up here,” he said, and touched what had been the bad side of his face.
