with his little bags of hot roasted pinon nuts, and the music and laughter drifting out of La Golondrina, the restaurant, and the buyers drifting along looking at everything (the women stumbling on the uneven bricks, in their high heels)-at the gimcrack cheap jewelry and the beautiful handcrafted real stud from the little silversmithies here and south of the border, at the handmade baskets, and braided-leather and to0led-leather shoes, at the hand- blown glass and the hand-woven cotton (also at the boxed cheap linens from Belgium, and the good stud and the bad from Japan, from the Philippines, from everywhere in Europe)-and maybe stopping to have their fortunes told by the old woman at the far end of the street.
And even at ten-thirty in the morning, over the whole street there hung the faint scent of glamour-and that was the combined scents from the little cavelike shop, three breakneck steps down from street level, where the candles were made, the incredible rainbow candles scented with pine, with orange, with jasmine and gardenia, and nameless musky saccharine odors.
Most of the shops were shut, but he knew that behind many of them were living quarters. This was a minor little errand, he needn't have come himself, but-he also knew-he might have a better chance of getting whatever there was to get than the most fluent of his Spanish-speaking sergeants.
He could have wished that the article in question had been something other than a serape. That inimitable object of Mexicana, the long strip of rough cactus cloth or cotton, garishly striped and fringed, was to be had at all but a few specialty shops: but maybe that fact was balanced by another, that it had been raining that night.
He started at the mouth of the street and took one side at a time. Not every shop had quarters attached; not everyone was at home. Everyone who was was anxious to be helpful but remembered nothing of any use to him… To be sure, most places had remained open that rainy evening. When one was under shelter, and it was the regular time for business, why not? There was always a chance that the rain would slacken, that a few people who had decided to come to the street would not be put off by the weather. And so it had been: business had been very poor, of course, but a few buyers had come-chiefly people who had reservations at the restaurant and visited the shops afterward. But many places had closed earlier than usual, ten or ten-thirty. Not all, no. Wine was pressed on him. In one place a very old woman looked on him in contempt and called him a police spy. In the place next door a pretty high-school-age girl asked him please would he talk to her brother and tell him he was crazy: 'See, Joe keeps saying he's got nine counts on him to start, being Mexican-what's the use of trying to get educated and so on, he'd never get anywhere, might as well get things however you can. He's in with some real bad fellows, Mama and I get worried-and if you'd just show him-' He took the name and address for Taylor in Juvenile; Taylor would see one of the youth counselors contacted Joe and did what he could… By the time he got to the mouth of the street again, having worked his way right up one side and down the other, Mendoza, who was not a wine drinker, was feeling slightly bilious and disgruntled at this waste of time.
But there, in the end shop-scarcely more than an alcove, now, shut off from the street by a large board, with a single room behind it-he found Manuel Perez, improving the out-of-business hour by making up his accounts. Mr. Perez removed his horn-rimmed glasses, listened gravely to Mendoza's questions, and said at once that he remembered the occasion very well indeed.
'At last I arrive,' said Mendoza. 'Now why didn't I start here? Tell me.'
It seemed that Mr. Perez had kept his shop open later than any other that rainy night, not in the hope of customers but because he was waiting for his son, who had borrowed the family car to take his girl to a school dance. La familia Perez lived a couple of miles away from the street, and especially on a cold wet night Mr. Perez had not fancied the walk home. The dance was to be over at midnight, and Diego, who was a good reliable boy, would then deliver his girl home and come to pick up his father at the shop: which in fact he had done, somewhere around twelve-thirty.
Meanwhile Mr. Perez had spent a quiet evening sitting in his shop, waiting on the few customers who came. 'And you comprehend, later on it's pleasant sitting there alone-a few other shopkeepers who don't live here, they called out goodnight as they left-the Garcias two doors up stayed open late, and Mrs. Sanchez across the way too, it's anything to make a dollar with that one-but the lights go out, one by one, and presently I'm the only one left open, and all is quiet but for the rain, splat-splat-splat, outside… I took the opportunity to write a letter to my brother in Fresno, and later on I read my book-I always keep a book here for the slow times, I'm a great reader and at home with the children it's noisy… ' And just about midnight, as Mr. Perez sat reading in his little lonely circle of light, a woman's voice spoke to him from the street.
Startled, he had looked up, and there she was outside the perimeter of light, no more than a dark figure. His glasses were for reading distance and in his surprise he hadn't taken them off, so he could give only a vague description. She spoke hurriedly and with a strange foreign accent on her English; she said she wanted something to protect her hat from the rain; one of his serapes would do, how much were they? The whole, queer little transaction happened so quickly that it was not until she was gone that Mr. Perez told himself it was surely odd, when she wanted to save her hat from the rain, that she had not naturally stepped over the threshold into the shop… 'But no, she stays outside, she is really only a hand and arm reaching into the light, you understand?'
On hearing the price, two dollars, she held out the money, said any one would do, and he took it over to her. But she had forgotten the tax, the eight cents for the state, and when he reminded her she had impatiently handed him another dollar bill, said, 'That's all right, don't bother about change,” and walked away rapidly. This Mr. Perez had not liked, because he was an honest man and also had his pride, and he did not like to accept tips like a waiter; however, she was gone-'and money is money.”
'That is very true. Was she carrying anything?'
Yes, she had had a suitcase; this she had set down a little in front of her to open her purse, and Mr. Perez had seen it a trifle more clearly than the lady. It had been an old brown leather suitcase. And the purse she was carrying, it had glistened as she opened it, catching the reflection of light from the shop-he thought it might have been of that shiny plastic, or perhaps patent leather, a dark color.
'And her hand-you saw her sleeve and hand?' Mendoza thought of Cara Kingman's silver-enameled fingernails.
Yes, so Mr. Perez had. A light-colored sleeve, of a coat he thought, but could not say whether a long or short coat-and it had a dark cuff, like velvet. As for the hand, the lady had been wearing gloves.
'Of what sort?' asked Mendoza.
'One small thing I can tell you about that,' said Mr. Perez. 'You comprehend, her hand is closer to me, and partly in the light, so I have a better look-for just that one small moment. She handed the money to me between her fingers, and then when I spoke of the tax, she reached into her purse again-impatient, you know-and held the third bill out on her palm, like so. Her gloves were a very light tan color, like raw leather-I don't know if they were leather or cloth-but they had buttons on the inside of the wrist, and when she held her hand out so, I saw that on that glove-her left hand it would be-the little button was missing.'
A small amber-colored button in the loose earth raked over the corpse. ' Diez millen demonios negros desde infierno! ' said Mendoza.
'This does not, I fear,' said Mr. Perez sympathetically, 'please you to hear for some reason.'
'On the contrary, it is very helpful indeed. But at the moment I don't know what it means-except that I have been wrong somewhere-or exactly what to do with it… '
Hackett's older sister had a couple of kids, and when they were smaller, a few years ago, once in a while he'd got roped in to sit with them, read to them. There was a thing the little girl had been crazy about, The Wizard of Oz; he'd read out of that one a good deal, and right now something in it came back to him. The way one of the wicked witches had just disappeared when she died-nothing left at all, because all there'd been to her was a kind of shell of malice.
He wouldn't, some odd superstitious way, be at all surprised if the same thing happened to Mona Ferne before his eyes. Maybe Mr. Horwitz took a jaundiced general view, but he'd been so right about this one. The front, and that was absolutely all…
'Such a terrible thing, I can't bear to think of it,' she said in her light, sweet voice. 'Poor darling Brooke. He did have talent, you know, he'd have done great things, I'm convinced-it's a tragedy for that reason as well as for all his friends.'
'Yes, of course,' said Hackett. 'When did you see Mr. Twelvetrees last, Miss Ferne?'
