Лесли Чартерис: Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 3, March, 1953

“At least you should go to bed and stay there.”

I couldn’t explain to him that there wasn’t room in my mind for thinking about hospitals or beds. The fat face of Hammond and the thin features of Rath, and the white, dead face of Pete Ramirez took up all the room there was in my mind. I just wasn’t able to think about anything else even if I’d wanted to. And I didn’t want to.

Before he’d started working on me I’d given Doctor Dominguez the cube of gum still in my pocket, the Chiclet, and told him what I suspected. Half an hour after he finished bandaging me he had the other answer.

“Yes, Mr. Scott,” he said, “it was drugged. Crude, too; somebody merely hollowed out a small space inside the gum and filled it with the powder—”

“Would it kill a man?”

He frowned. “It might. Hard to say. It would at least make him sluggish, drowsy. Why? Where did you get this?”

“Arthur Hammond gave it to a jockey who was killed today.”

He got slightly green. “Ah... no, you must be mistaken, Mr. Hammond is a well thought of man.” It was obvious the name Hammond frightened him. He said, less warmly, professional now, “That is all I can do for you.”

It was also obvious he wanted to get rid of me. I paid him, asked him to call me a cab, and left.

I stood outside the Rio Rosa, a nightclub near Insurgentes, pain constant in my chest and stomach. I’d got a morphine surette from the doctor, but it was in my pocket; I might need it more later than I did right now. From the doc’s I’d gone to the Prado and picked up my gun, then I had started hunting for any one of the four men I was after. But now, three hours later, this was the only lead I had. I’d checked the phone book: no Hammond. A man with as many enemies as Hammond undoubtedly had doesn’t advertise his address. I’d checked every crumb I knew in Mexico City, and plenty I didn’t know. His address was a complete mystery. Almost all I’d learned was that a lot of people were afraid of Hammond and his thugs — and of Hammond’s pal, Valdez. But I learned that a couple of months ago Jimmy Rath had paid the rent on an apartment for a girl named Chatita, who was now in the show here at Rio Rosa — and apparently didn’t like Rath any more. I went inside.

For fifty pesos the headwaiter let me knock on the door of Chatita’s dressing room. When she opened the door, her eyes widened with surprise. I guess I didn’t look very handsome, with my jaw swollen and a cut in the flesh over my cheekbone.

I said, “May I talk to you for a minute?”

She looked at my bruised face, frowning. “I am sorry. I must get dressed.”

Now that I took a look at her, she was right. She had on a silk wrapper thin enough so that the points of her full breasts showed through it. She started to shut the door and I took a chance. “It’s about Jimmy Rath.”

I got more than I bargained for. “Jimmy!” she said venomously. She opened the door wide, looked at my face again, “Did he do this to you?” I nodded and she said, “Come in.”

She shut the door behind me, locked it, then turned to face me. “Sit down,” she said, pointing toward a wooden chair. “You... do not like Jimmy?”

“I hate him,” I said. “I want to find him and tell him so.”

She smiled. It wasn’t a very nice smile. “I hope you find him,” she said. “I hope you beat him to death.”

This Chatita was tall, close to six feet in her high heels, and she would have towered above Rath. He was shaping up as a queer one. Chatita had the sensual, smooth-skinned face found on many of the lovely Mexican women, with large dark eyes and a mass of black hair. Her face had a hot beauty that went with her full-curved body.

“Where can I find him?” I asked.

“I wish I knew. How do you know I once knew him?”

“I heard you were friendly. Not any more, huh?”

She walked toward me, stood in front of the chair I sat in. “I am an exotica ,” she said. “A dancer.” She meant, I figured, that she did a strip act. She went on, “My body, it assures me a living, a job.”

I didn’t know what she was getting at, but I nodded.

“My body,” she said, “it is good. It is to be proud of.” She had been holding the thin robe around her; now she parted it, slid it down from her shoulders as she faced me.

She wore brief step-ins beneath it, nothing else. And she did have a lovely body, full and voluptuously curving. Her breasts were large, firm, erect. I didn’t know why she had so suddenly pulled the robe from her shoulders, but soon I understood.

Her flat stomach was a criss-cross of scratches where someone had played there with a sharp knife. “You see,” she said. “That is from Jimmy. I hope you find him.” She bit her lip. “My body he has made ugly. Ugly!” She pulled the robe back over her shoulders.

She sat in a chair before the dressing table and we talked for a few minutes. When she’d known Rath, he had lived in Arthur Hammond’s house — but she didn’t know where the house was. It seemed no one knew where the fat bastard lived. Except for that she couldn’t help me, though she gave me a better picture of Rath himself.

“He is evil,” she said, “insanely evil. He bought me expensive things, but I could not stay. I was with him one month. The cuts, they are from the knife he carries always.” She hesitated, then went on, “Even in bed. He would hold it here—” she pointed to her throat — “when he... at the moment when...” She didn’t finish it, but I knew what she meant. After a pause she continued, as if she wanted to share what she knew with somebody else, “He wanted me to hurt him. He liked to hurt and be hurt. Twice he gave to me the knife, asking that I hurt him with it. Carefully, he would say, carefully. But I could not do it and he would become angry, frightening. Then, one night, he did this to me.” She touched her stomach.

She was quiet for a minute. I had already told her that if I found Rath I was going to break several of his bones, and she said, “If you do find him, remind him of this. Will you, for me?” Her fingers moved slowly over her stomach beneath her silk robe again. “It would help me,” she said, “because there is inside me much hate for him.”

“I’ll remind him, Chatita. If there’s time.”

I started to get up normally, forgetting my bruises, and flopped back into the chair. The next try I made it moving slowly. Chatita stepped to me and took my arm, her free softening for the first time. “I did not know you were hurt so. You hate him as much as I, no?”

“Maybe more, honey.” Her robe had fallen open, baring her breasts. I put my hands on her shoulders, caressed her gently and said, “You probably make the cuts worse in your mind than they really are, Chatita. To a man, they mean nothing. Believe me. You’re a beautiful and desirable woman, honey.”

I could hear her breathing quicken as I continued to touch her. Her tongue moved over her lower lip. “Thank you,” she said. “It is good of you, but it is not true.”

“It is true.”

Under different circumstances, I don’t think I’d have got out of there before morning. But I left. Before she closed the door she smiled at me and said, “Thank you. Perhaps... perhaps it is true.”

I grinned, said, “You damn bet it is,” and staggered out of the place.

At two in the morning I gave up and went back to my room at the del Prado. I hadn’t learned anything except what Chatita had told me, and by two o’clock I felt like a walking hamburger. I went to bed.

Getting up in the morning and getting dressed was a solid half hour of agony. It had been bad enough before I slept, but now my muscles had stiffened and every movement was torture. I was two-hundred-plus pounds of pain — and hate. But the hate was stronger than the pain.