Here was one of her shoes, lying on its side at the foot of the bed. Some mixed-up monitor in Jenny’s head must have instructed her to turn back the bedspread, as if for a fully dressed daytime nap, because the other shoe was underneath it. So was St. Ives’ message, now somewhat crumpled: “Mary—Jenny didn’t really have this much to drink but she has no head for liquor.” The underscoring was so pronounced that if Mary had found the note at once she might have been reassured enough to go peacefully to sleep, while in the next bed—
But she spoke to us just now, thought Mary, blanking out a frightful vision of waking to find Jenny stilled forever. It was nonsense, but she spoke.
“Where’s her coat?” asked St. Ives urgently, and Mary brought it from the bathroom. Together, while Jenny’s head lolled, they got her arms into the sleeves and managed her upright and to the door. Surprisingly, her legs moved like the wheels of a mechanical toy in need of oiling, late but obedient. It wouldn’t matter for her sake if anyone saw her being conducted along in this head-hanging fashion, because Mary was certain that it would be safe to leave here in the morning.
But was Daniel Brennan watching from somewhere, right now?
Brennan was not. He had finished his drink and ordered another, not that he particularly wanted it but because his room and his bed, one of Jaime’s creakily protesting specials, had no immediate appeal. Also, the evening had gone as empty as a bottle upended over a sink.
A guest at the motel, Mary Vaughan had said to his inquiry about Jenny’s dinner companion, and she had sounded defensive. She did not want the man criticized—unless it was some motherly woman, which Brennan doubted very much. In spite of her skin-and-bone appearance, Jenny had a core of strength—and physical strength as well, as who should know better than he after her fierce and wiry resistance in the pool?—which he suspected other women would recognize.
He should have clarified himself to Mary Vaughan (or Mary, he said tentatively to himself), previous and even egregious though it had seemed at the time. It was clear in every line of her that she was not a dallier with married men and for all she knew he had an unsuspecting wife and possibly a few children at home. But—even though she had looked to him across a lobby and then a dining room like the piece of incredible good fortune that doesn’t drop into a man’s life more than once—how to say, with the proper casualness, “I was married four years ago, or I thought I was until husband number one turned out to be hale, well, and undivorced”?
Mina. Black-haired, gray-eyed, captivating him with the diverse activities—ballet lessons, a course in Greek and another in gourmet cooking—which had turned out to be not evidence of a lively mind and energy but a dissatisfaction that burned like an eternal flame. Unfairly, she had turned him against women of that particular coloring, like Jenny Acton.
Who had an enemy, which automatically involved her travelling companion. Was the planting of a drug the entire gratification of revenge, retaliation, whatever it was? Brennan supposed so; it certainly seemed enough. Still, he wished that Mary had left her lighter or cigarettes behind, so that he could go legitimately back to her door and see for himself that all was well.
There was no need to talk deceptively inside his own head. Of course all was well, although from the looks of her Jenny was assembling a hangover measurable on the Richter scale. He simply wanted to see Mary again before he slept. He could and would look her up in Santa Fe, but her life was probably full of people, and at any remove from the immediacy of her situation this evening he would be only an unwelcome reminder of a very unpleasant episode. Gloomily, he could hear her saying to some unspecified person, “If a Mr. Brennan calls, I’m not in.”
In spite of its location and appearance, Jaime’s was not a nest of revellers, and at a little after eleven-thirty the bar was beginning to empty, most of its inhabitants trailing off in the direction of the lobby and stairs, a few causing the slamming of car doors and starting of engines in the courtyard. Brennan wasn’t sleepy, thought of the thin blear of light from the lamp over his bed and remembered the hundred-watt bulb, bought that morning, reposing in the glove compartment of his car. He finished his drink and went outside.
A few windows were still lit, but the unseasonable chill had chased most of the guests in and to bed early. Mary’s upstairs corner room, to which his gaze lifted at once, was dark. Her hazel eyes had looked brilliant with fatigue; she must have gone to sleep almost at once.
Would she be roused by a sharp police knocking?
Probably, if she had left this address behind her at the Casa de Flores, although he couldn’t imagine why she would. Jenny’s ex-gentleman friend would have directed the police to the motel, with a tale of having been approached with cocaine for sale, but how far did they go when their bird had flown? Make an automatic check of other motels, in case Jenny Acton had taken alarm and moved out?
Or simply notify U.S. Customs, with the rider that this drug-peddler belonged in Mexican jurisdiction because the event in question had taken place on their soil?
Brennan had no idea. It hardly mattered, because the suitcase was thoroughly clean, apart from the worrying notion of Mary being waked and subjected to even a brief interrogation. Obviously they couldn’t ask questions of Jenny.
A car came around the corner of the annex as Brennan unlocked the door of his and reached into the glove department. A departing employee, because that was the service area.
But, although it wasn’t unusual for their U.S. counterparts to own something
