Star-shaped red tail-lights, the front seats of the car poised briefly at the gate the tall tapering kind suggesting a pair of nuns. There were two occupants; the interior light flicked briefly on and showed a dipping profile as the passenger door was opened a little—for a fold of caught clothing?—and closed again.
Somehow astonishingly, because it meant that she had left Jenny behind her in a dark room, Mary Vaughan.
15
IN the back seat, after an inarticulate mumble of protest when for all St. Ives’ care her head got bumped smartly, Jenny had subsided into a tangle of hair and raincoat and Raggedy Ann legs. Her disorientation seemed complete. She had opened her eyes once in the shadowy service area where Mary held her propped while Owen St. Ives went for his car, but showed neither surprise nor concern at these peculiar surroundings.
It was only what amounted to black-out, wasn’t it? They would know very shortly. At St. Ives’ suggestion, Mary had pocketed one of the yellow-and-white capsules from Jenny’s suitcase, because while medications came in all kinds of color combinations, depending on the manufacturer, it was just possible that a doctor might be able to identify this one at once.
The trip from the room to the service elevator and then down had been accomplished without incident —without, in fact, meeting another soul, a fact for which Mary was grateful; she found that an innocent and necessitous act bestowed a feeling of near-criminality when carried out with every appearance of stealth. Jenny’s condition would be evident to a closer look and a sniff, but at first glance she would be put down as the victim of kidnapers.
Mary had expected some kind of investigation when the elevator doors rattled open—for service only, this mechanism did not seem to get a lot of smooth care—and again when St. Ives used the rear exit to go out for his car. But at this hour a kitchen crew was loudly busy, behind heavy swing doors, with dishes, pots and pans, pails, occasional shouted sallies and less genial imprecations.
She felt calmer now that they were actually on their way to the hospital, but still with a nervous need to talk. “This would have caused a fluster at the Casa de Flores,” she said as they turned out through the gate, and then, “I didn’t want to alarm Jenny yesterday, but I’m almost sure I did hear something odd from that room last night.”
. . So did I,” said St. Ives, giving her his belated attention. Downtown Juarez had by no means gone to bed, and he was having to be forceful about maintaining his place in the thick stream of lights. Bicycles wanted to cut in; so did taxis. “I found out tonight that the invalid, or whatever he is, was evidently in a state where the nurse decided that some female company would calm him down, so one of the prettier bar waitresses was sent up.”
He sounded the horn lightly at the car in front, whose driver was engaged in conversation with a companion although the red light had turned green. “The girl is no longer at the motel—handsomely paid off, I assume, and with a recommendation somewhere else—but she’s a cousin of the room-service waiter I talked to originally and she told him that the man sprang at her, babbling about company spies, and blacked her eye before the nurse, and a hefty one at that, could get him under control. He wasn’t young,” added St. Ives.
A proxy fight had been one of his earlier speculations, Mary remembered, wincing a little at the speed with which the girl had been sent up as an offering. Had the man then begun to believe, because a notion once entertained in an unbalanced mind was apt to send out tendrils everywhere, that she and Jenny were also spies? That sudden heavy impact against the door behind her chair, as though to crash through it. . . Did he only have bouts of this, had he been spirited off to Mexico by one faction so that he should not be viewed in his current state by another?
The hospital would be coming up soon on their left, and like a number of smokers Mary was increasingly careful about lighting a cigarette in places where it would be considered offensive, even though this new campaign placed a weapon in the hands of uncaring people who had never had a weapon before and tended to use it with zeal. She reached inside her bag for package and lighter. “I suppose we’ll never know, exactly.”
“I suppose not,” agreed St. Ives. He sounded faintly amused—at something he was discreetly keeping back about the bar waitress?
Although the traffic was thinning, he was keeping an eye on the rear-view mirror, and he wrenched the car suddenly into a side street. “Gang of toughs behind us, waving bottles,” he said. “I’d just as soon lose them for a couple of minutes.”
“I think that was the hospital, up ahead in the next block,” said Mary, having had a fast glimpse of a modernistic building with blue lights to mark it. But it was too late; they would have to circle back. The front entrance had looked peculiarly closed for the night, but that couldn’t be so. Sirens sounded frequently in the city during the small hours, and at least some of them must indicate victims of traffic accident or violent family argument.
Had there been a small Pavlovian stir from Jenny at the word “hospital”?
Mary twisted to peer back between the difficult seats, but they were off the main street now and it was too dark to see anything but a vague sprawl and a pale glimmer of face. Because of that brief inspection, she was late in registering
