Fletcher Flora - The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery MEGAPACK™ - 20 Classic Mystery & Crime Stories!

“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 room.”

“He’s guilty. He’s guilty as hell.”

“Very possible, señorita. Even very likely. But the case lacks completion. There are the loose ends to gather. In the meantime, he is secure. Believe me, the police of my country are not the children playing a man’s game. It is better that you leave these things in my hands.”

A deep breath fluttered her lips. The whisper came straight my way now, skipping Tellez. “You killed Ivan, and you’ll die for it. Tonight you stood in that hot room and stabbed him from behind because you’re a lousy little man who can’t even hang on to a wife, and if it’s the last thing I do on earth, I’ll see you as dead as he is.”

I looked at her for a moment, feeling sick, and it seemed impossible that anyone could feel like that about a harmless sort of guy who had done nothing worse than write a best-seller.

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks very much.”

Then, not looking at anyone, I turned and went out and back to my own room. I walked over to the glass doors which were open onto the balcony, and I stood there for a long time, maybe half an hour, feeling the cool air on my face and looking at the improbable stars. They were so close that it seemed I could reach up and rake them down with my fingers. I thought that it would be a satisfactory conclusion to everything if I could reach beyond them to the black velvet sky and pull the whole works down upon a world that had gone both barren and mad. I didn’t even hear Hannah come into the room behind me. I didn’t know she was there until she spoke.

“Carey,” she said.

I turned. Her eyes were no longer blind. They were filled now with a kind of general sorrow for the things that happened and the people they happened to. People like her and me and maybe Ivan.

“Did you kill him, Carey?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t kill him.”

It must have been the answer she expected, for she accepted it.

“I came to ask you that question, and one other. This is the other one: Do you believe something that seemed bigger than the world, bigger than you or anything that ever happened to you before, could end utterly and finally without warning or reason? No, don’t answer. I only want to tell you that it can. Tonight, when Ivan took me to my room, I thought I would love him forever, and there was no question in my mind, but then, all at once I didn’t love him at all. I stood there on my balcony, and I only knew that I was terribly lonely and needed someone very much, and it was you I needed. It was like waking suddenly from an impossible dream. I kept thinking about things that happened to us, little things and big things, and I knew that I would have to have you back or die. That’s the reason I went to Ivan’s room, to tell him this.”