“He tried to-” She swerved rapidly to the side of the road and pulled up on the shoulder. “Did you just say what I think you said?”
“I’m afraid so. He tried to shove me off the platform. He wound up going over the edge instead.”
“But why? That’s crazy!”
He spread his hands. “I don’t have a clue.”
“My God. Tell me what happened.”
“There’s not much to tell. I was answering one of his questions about the ball court, and I had my back to him, and I heard-I don’t know what I heard-a sob, maybe, and I’d been worried about him anyway because he’d been acting strangely.”
“Strangely how?”
“Tense, nervous, preoccupied…” He gestured at the ignition. “Could we get going again, please?”
“Gideon, at this point, I think I’m more shaky than you are. I mean, if you hadn’t been turning around… if you…” She let out a breath. “Do you feel up to driving? I think it’d be safer.”
“Yes, I’m okay. The adrenaline rush is over, and so is the knees-like-jelly follow-up. I’m me again.”
“I never had the pleasure of the adrenaline rush, I’ve gone straight to the knees-like-jelly phase. When I think what might have… whew.”
They switched seats, and then Gideon turned the engine on once more and edged out onto the highway.
For the next few miles there was only silence, and then Julie picked up the conversation where they’d left it. “Okay, so you hear what sounds like a sob behind you…”
“And I turn, and as I turn, here he comes at me, full speed ahead. I-well, I’m not sure what I did. I guess I sort of stepped out of the way and backhanded him-you know, a swipe with my arm to keep him off me-and over he goes, without a sound. Hit the landing on the stairs, bounced off, and fell the rest of the way down.”
“And hit his head, obviously.”
“I couldn’t be positive at the time, but yes, obviously.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I called Annie, and you know the rest.”
She nodded. “How serious do you think Tony’s injuries are?”
“Serious,” Gideon said. “Put it this way: if he’s lucky, he’ll die, because I don’t think his brain’s going to be of much use to him from now on.”
Another quiet nod, followed by a soft sigh.
“How are you feeling about this, Julie? I know you liked him. You must feel-”
“What I’m feeling,” she said firmly, “is relief, enormous, overwhelming relief that you’re still here.” She reached across to put her hand on his thigh. When he covered it with his own, he could feel it trembling. He curled his fingers gently around it. “What I’m feeling,” she went on, and now the tremble was in her voice as well, “is thank God you acted the way you did, as quickly as you did. If something had happened to you… I can’t even…”
He squeezed her hand, not trusting himself to speak, thinking for the thousandth time: How fantastically lucky I am to have her, to be loved by this beautiful, marvelous woman.
“What I’m feeling about Tony?” She continued after a moment, in a steadier voice. “I haven’t sorted that out yet. Disbelief. Incomprehension. Bewilderment. What could he have been thinking? Was he crazy? What possible motivation could he have to do that to you?”
“Oh, I think I know what his motivation was.”
She looked sharply at him. “I thought you didn’t have a clue.”
“Not to his reason, no, but to his motivation, I think so, yes.”
“You’ll have to explain that.”
“His motivation was to prevent my seeing that skull this afternoon. What else could it possibly be?”
“Well-almost anything. I don’t know, maybe it had something to do with your identifying Blaze’s skeleton.”
“I guess so, but that‘’s already done; he couldn’t do anything to change that. Also, he found out about that yesterday, at dinner. He’s had all kinds of time to cook up some more subtle, less risky way to do me in between then and now-I don’t know, poison, an accident, whatever. But he didn’t. Then at, what was it, about eight o’clock this morning, he finds out I’m going to look at the skull this afternoon, and two hours later he’s shoving me off a wall in a public place. I can hardly imagine a more desperate, clumsy, dicey way to try to kill somebody. Why was he in such a hurry?”
“Because he had no time to plan anything fancier,” Julie said, nodding. “Because we were going into Oaxaca at noon.”
“That’s the way I see it.”
“Yes, you’re right, I think. But why was he so afraid of your seeing the skull?”
“Ah, see, that”s what I meant about the reason part. That”s the part I don’t know.”AS usual, Marmolejo didn’t seem to be doing much of anything when they got to his office. He was standing at one of the big mullioned windows, demitasse cup and saucer in his hands, tranquilly contemplating the peaceful scene in the plaza below. As always, he had on an embroidered white guayabera worn outside crisply pressed pants. His eyes lit up when he saw Julie, for whom he had a soft spot, and they quickly embraced, with the top of Marmolejo”s head coming up to the level of her nose. He called for more coffee at once, and pastries as well, sat them down in the cozy grouping of leather armchairs in one corner of the big room, and started chattering happily about old times.
“Javier, this isn’t exactly a social call,” Gideon said.
Marmolejo”s eyebrows rose. “I grieve to hear it.” He waited expectantly.
Telling him about what had happened at Yagul took five minutes. Explaining to him who Tony Gallagher was, and the whole twisted story of the Gallaghers and their Byzantine history, took half an hour, most of it provided by Julie. Corporal Vela had brought in coffee and a plate of chocolate wafers. Only Gideon, suddenly ravenous, had eaten any of the wafers, wolfing down four of them, when Marmolejo called a pause to ask Vela to contact the hospital in Tlacolula about Tony”s condition. The coffee had been drunk, and Vela had brought in another serving in fresh demitasse cups.
“And so you believe this attack occurred because he was afraid of what you might find when you looked at the skull?” Marmolejo asked as he spooned in his usual two teaspoons of sugar. “There was no history of animosity between you?”
“None. It’s got to be the skull.”
Marmolejo stirred, tapped the tiny spoon elegantly against the cup’s rim, and laid it soundlessly down in the saucer. “And of what do you think he was frightened?”
“We talked about that in the car,” Julie answered, giving Gideon a chance at another couple of wafers. “All we could come up with was that he was afraid that the skull would turn out to be Manolo’s-at breakfast this morning, we told him that we thought it might be.”
“And if it was? Why should that cause him concern?”
“Well, if he murdered Manolo-and if he killed Blaze as well-and wouldn’t it make sense that the same person killed them both?-then…” She shrugged.
“Then what? Let’s say he did kill them. Why should identifying the skull as Manolo’s, if indeed it should turn out to be, bring suspicion down on Tony Gallagher in particular?”
“We couldn’t come up with any reasonable answer for that either, Javier,” Gideon said, swallowing a slug of coffee to wash down the wafers. “We also couldn’t think of any reason for Tony to kill them in the first place. He wasn’t a betrayed husband or a jealous lover, after all; he was Blaze’s brother.”
“I wonder if we’re barking up the wrong tree altogether,” Julie said thoughtfully. “Maybe your going to look at the skull doesn’t have anything to do with what happened in Yagul. Maybe it is just an old Zapotec skull after all, and not Manolo’s.”
“That could be,” Gideon said. “But my intuition’s sure telling me otherwise. In any case, we’ll find that out this afternoon.”
At this point Corporal Vela came in with a sheet of paper for Marmolejo. “ Gracias, Alejandro,” he said, and scanned the few typewritten lines on it. “It’s about Mr. Gallagher. The hospital says his condition is critical but has stabilized. He is in a coma designated as a five on the Glasgow scale.” He looked at Gideon. “Is this something with which you’re familiar?”
