Tellez cleared his throat musically and permitted his big, liquid eyes to encounter mine. They looked sad enough to break your heart.
“Now, señor, it is necessary that you talk. Circumstances, you will admit, do not appear favorable for you. Reflect, if you please. Señora MacCauley, with whom you have become estranged over the handsome. Ivan, rouses in the night, for reasons which she declines to divulge, and makes her way to Ivan’s room. The door is open. Very strange. She looks into the room and beholds Ivan on the floor, as we all have seen him. Beyond Ivan, slumped in the open doorway to the terrace, she sees her husband…you, señor. You are sitting there—how shall I say, Señor?”
“You can say drunk. Passed out.”
He smiled gratefully and bobbed his head. “Thank you, señor. Passed out. Señora MacCauley, a lady with a sense of duty, contacts the hotel authorities, who in turn contact the police. So, señor, I arrive. While I speak with Señora MacCauley, Señorita Trent arrives. She arrives, as she confesses with charming frankness, to make a last effort to regain the affection of that Ivan. A most popular fellow, Ivan.”
He paused, wagging his head from side to side in admiration and staring at me with swimming regret and sadness.
“And now, señor, since you are almost certainly guilty of murder, it is time for you to try to convince me otherwise.”
I tried until it hurt, but all the time I had a feeling that I wasn’t doing much good. My head swelled and contracted like a frog’s throat, and my tongue was as thick as a catcher’s mitt. Everything was distorted inside my skull and came out worse. Tellez listened in silence, his placid, olive face assuming an intensifying expression of pain, as if it grieved him sorely to see such a fine, young Americano come to such an evil and floundering end.
“This man you mention…this Señor Smith…although your story sounds incredible, it will do much to give it another face if he corroborates it.” He turned to the slender Mexican with the notebook. “Manuel, you will go at once to room six-sixteen and request Señor Smith’s presence here.”
Manuel went, and we waited. Tellez hummed softly a gay, incongruous air of fiesta. Hannah stood very still by the door. Once her eyes met mine, and the blindness was gone for a second, and there was for that second an expression I had once known well and hadn’t thought to see again. It looked like love.
Eva Trent sat on the arm of a chair. She leaned back in a posture that should have been relaxed, one arm flung out along the top of the back, but the effect was not one of relaxation at all. There was about her an atmosphere of passionate tenseness, and I remembered that she had loved Ivan beyond pride, and that Ivan was dead. She had wanted him back, she said, on any terms, and now there were no terms left by which she or anyone else could ever have him.
* * * *
My head expanded and shrank again and again, and Manuel appeared quietly in the room.
“Pardon, señor,” he said. “There is no response.
Tellez faced him, tapping his white teeth with a polished fingernail.
“The number was six-sixteen?”
“Most certainly!”
“You made the big effort?”
“Enough to wake the dead!”
“Not Señor Ivan, I hope.” Tellez chuckled at his little joke. Then, as if conceding and regretting its poor taste, bit the chuckle off with a snap of the white teeth. “Go at once to the desk and consult the register.”
But by then I knew. I knew even before Manuel returned that Señor Smith was not on the register. Señor Smith had ceased to exist. It was apparent from his attitude as he listened to Manuel’s report that Tellez was convinced that Señor Smith had never existed at all.
“You are sure?” he asked. “He is not registered?”
Manuel shrugged. “The clerk was positive. No one is registered for room six-sixteen. It is empty.”
Tellez turned on me like a sleek cat, purring. “Ah,” he said.
I put the heel of a hand against my forehead and pressed hard, but the throbbing kept right on. My brain still refused to cooperate. I thought of the man I had taken for a waiter at the bar downstairs, the one who had requested most urgently that I come to room six-sixteen. But I didn’t even bother to mention him, because I knew that there would be no such waiter. Only one person would remember my ascent to six, the elevator operator. He would remember, and he would tell, and it would place me very patly at the right place at the right time.
“It happened like I told you,” I said. “I can’t prove it, but that’s the way it happened.”
Tellez looked pained at my foolish tenacity. He lifted his plump arms with a sigh. “Señor, there is much to be said for confession. It cleanses the soul, it predisposes the authorities to leniency.”
“To hell with the authorities,” I said.
His eyes rolled up whitely. After all, what could one do but one’s best? One could do nothing more, obviously, except consign the Americano to the inevitable consequences of his own idiocy.
“Very well, señor. It becomes necessary for me to tell you that you are not to leave the hotel. It is possible, after reflection, that you will arrive at a more sensible attitude.”
On the arm of her chair, Eva Trent moved. Her body came up slowly from its half-reclining position, her dark eyes feverish, bright spots the size of silver dollars burning on the high bones of her cheeks. The feverish eyes were on me, but her voice, an incredulous whisper, was directed to Tellez. “You’re letting him go?”
“No, señorita. I am letting him retire to his
