In the photograph on the third page of the Excelsior, Ramón looked out with stubborn, haggard intensity—like any other murderer. They would not kill him, unfortunately, but they would give him fifteen years at least, Theodore thought, perhaps in some wretched, evil-smelling jail. And it might be that Ramón’s conscience would punish him more severely than death.
That afternoon, Theodore had another of the mysterious, silent telephone calls.
“Elissa?” he asked. “Elissa, if it’s you—just say it’s you.” He thought—but he wasn’t sure—that he heard a sigh. And how could one tell if a sigh were male or female? He strained his ear to hear any background noise, then put the telephone down in anger.
He called Sauzas’s number, asked for Extension 847, and after a wait of five minutes or so Sauzas came to the telephone. “Bueno. Teodoro Schiebelhut,” Theodore said. “I’ve just had another telephone call in which no one speaks. I thought I should tell you, so that at least we know it is not Ramón.”
“Hm-m,” Sauzas said in a preoccupied way.
Thedore did not know what to say next. “What’re you going to do to Ramón?” he asked.
“Do to him? Ugh! If he is guilty, twenty years.”
“If?”
“He is a strange one. I think he is guilty, yes, but he’s now saying he sent the postcard. This I just don’t believe—” Sauzas trailed off in a dubious grunt.
“That’s not very important, is it? He probably thinks, since he confessed, he should confess everything.”
“Yes—but I am not absolutely sure. I am going to have some psychiatrists look at him.”
“If they pronounce him insane, that’s not true,” Theodore said quickly. “He has spells—temper, headaches—but it’s not true that he’s insane.”
“We’ll see, Señior Schiebelhut!” Sauzas interrupted. “Are you nervous? Would you like to have a guard at your house?”
“Why, no,” Theodore protested. “Why?”
“No reason. Just for your sake. It would be easy to arrange, but if you think it’s not necessary . . .”
Theodore felt most dissatisfied with the conversation after he had hung up. Of course, it was easy to post a guard in Mexico, they did it readily for the rich, but Theodore was not used to a system in which he was supposed to decide whether a guard should be posted or not. The police should know whether a guard was necessary, and if so simply post one.
It was Sauzas’s doubt that upset him most. “. . . not absolutely sure . . .” Psychiatrists! Well, the police were being cautious, Theodore supposed. There would be justice done, even in Mexico. Ramón’s fingerprint was on the knife, after all!
Once more the telephone calls came in. From Isabel Hidalgo, Olga next door—but not from Elissa Straeter, who perhaps slept until afternoon and had not seen the papers.
“A terrible surprise,” Theodore said into the telephone. “No. . . . Of course I had no idea that he had done it. . . .”
But of course he had, from the start.
Then, in the afternoon, the lawyer Castillo called. He wanted to know if Theodore wished to engage his services again for Ramón Otero.
“I think not now. He will be given a lawyer,” Theodore said.
“This is very odd. I really did not think he was guilty. But—the best of us can make mistakes, verdad?”
“Yes,” Theodore said. “Evidently.”
“Evidently. Well, now he will need a very good lawyer to get him off with a light sentence.”
“I’m afraid, señor—that is no concern of mine right now.”
“No. I understand, señor. Ah, so—salutations to you and adiós.”
“Adiós.”
A good lawyer, perhaps, but Ramón could certainly not afford to hire him on his own. Theodore smiled a little bitterly at the thought that he had hired him for poor Ramón just three weeks ago. Poor Ramón! It was more bitter to remember that he had considered Ramón his best friend. In spite of their difference in temperament—Latin from Anglo-Saxon, south from north, difference of education, upbringing, religion, everything—he had thought of Ramón in a brotherly way. He had never felt jealous in regard to Lelia, nor had Ramón seemed to feel any jealousy towards him. And perhaps there had been no logical reason for Ramón’s killing her. Perhaps it had been quite unpremeditated, the result of a horrible burst of anger.
This thought removed much of his resentment against Ramón, and left only a tremendous regret that anger had taken from him both the woman he loved and his friend.
In the next days, Theodore scanned the papers for news of Ramón’s investigation, but the papers said only that it was ‘continuing’ and that psychiatrists were making tests, not that they doubted or did not doubt his guilt. When Theodore on the second day of Ramón’s imprisonment tried to call Sauzas, he was unable to get him. He left a message that he would like Sauzas to call him, but the man on the other end of the telephone sounded indifferent, and Theodore doubted if Sauzas would ever get the message.
Theodore attempted a portrait of Inocenza, only the second that he had ever tried, and he found the picture neither very good nor very bad, which irritated him more than a total failure would have done. He could not get his mind off Ramón, and he was in a mood of mingled hatred and apprehension. He even imagined that the police might release Ramón. What then? Theodore realized that the block in his thinking was that he could not believe in Ramón’s innocence, whatever the police might say. If the police found him guilty and insane, that would not satisfy him either, but that had not happened yet. The chances were, Theodore thought, that Ramón would be pronounced guilty, and sane enough to be held responsible for his act.
He went over to visit Olga Velasquez. She cheered him superficially, planning and chattering about her Carnaval party and the decoration of the house and the garden.
“Promise me you will come, Teodoro. I know you are still depressed, but the party is three days from now. Maybe by that time you will like to come to a party.”
She sounded quite like Elissa Straeter. Theodore pushed his hand through his yellow hair and tried to smile.
“You think I am silly, talking of nothing but a party for days now, don’t you?” she asked, with a happy laugh.
“I love you for it,” Theodore said, meaning it sincerely, but wondering if he had said something vaguely improper in Spanish, because Olga looked at him with a surprised smile and her head on one side. When Theodore and Olga had first become acquainted, about three years ago, he had asked her to correct him when he made a blunder in Spanish, and she still sometimes did. But his accent was not so bad, he thought, in Spanish as it was in English. Theodore wrote his diary in English and read a great deal of English aloud to himself to try to improve. “Do you think I should make sure Ramón has a good lawyer, Olga?” Theodore asked suddenly.
She sat up a little in surprise. “You? Why should you?”
“It’s the law. If a man is guilty or not—and there are differences in lawyers.”
“Who says he deserves a lawyer!” Olga exclaimed impulsively. “Teo, I don’t see how you can think of that! And you still taking care of his bird! You should give it to your cat!” She slapped her hand down on her thigh and smiled.
But Theodore did not smile. “Perhaps I’m too exhausted to hate, Olga. When a man does a crime like that—he is out of his head, at least at the moment. Later, he regrets it himself. After the first shock of it, one’s hatred dies down.” He looked at her uncomprehending face.
“Still, he has done it. He has to be punished. I never thought Ramón was perfectly normal, Teo. Very charming, surely, and he knows how to behave with women! But it’s a look in his eye sometimes. Anyone could have seen that he had a temper like a wasp. And this—this horrible thing! Ramón deserves to pay for it, or else he’ll just do it to somebody else!”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that he shouldn’t pay for it. I didn’t mean a lawyer to get him off free,” Theodore protested, and stopped, because the conversation suddenly seemed futile to him. Besides, he was not sure of his own motives. It was a curse to be able to see two sides of things, perhaps three. He himself, along with the majority of Mexicans, did not believe in capital punishment, and yet when it came to something personal, it was an eye for an eye again. “You are right, Olga. It’s none of my business.”
“What is happening to him now? Isn’t there going to be a trial?”
“I suppose so. When they finish questioning him. They’re still questioning him. It’s been five days now.”
Theodore got the answer half an hour later, when he went home. Sauzas telephoned him and said that Ramón was to be released. His story did not hold water. There was no trace of blood on the knife, even under a microscope, and no blood on any clothes or shoes belonging to Ramón.
“He could have thrown his clothes away,” Theodore said.
“Hm-m. Well, it is my opinion and the opinion of the doctors that Ramón is just a psychological confessor—a psychological confessor,” Sauzas repeated, as if to lend weight to the phrase, which had no weight at all to Theodore when he heard it. “I suggested to Ramón that he dropped the knife behind the stove accidentally when he was drying the dishes with Lelia. He admits they used the knife that evening. And when you dry a knife and start to put it somewhere—in the box on the shelf right over the stove, as it happens—there will likely be a thumb-print, if one hand is holding the dish-cloth. Do you see?—Are you there, Señor Schiebelhut?”
“Yes, I am here.”
“There were, in fact, some traces of grease on the knife. But nothing else. No, señor, I think we must go back to the postcard and perhaps to the silent telephone calls you are getting. But the telephone calls will be very hard to trace. We shall have to try to trace the typewriter. The main reason I called you is because I would like to see you now. Are you free?”
“Yes,” Theodore said.
“Good. In about twenty minutes, then.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sauzas had not been to Theodore’s house before. He looked around him appreciatively, and commented on a painted wooden santo that Theodore had bought in San Miguel de Allende, and looked a long while also at one of Theodore’s paintings, which was of his left hand, the forefinger and thumb making a circle that enclosed the façade of an imaginary cathedral.
“You lead a pleasant life, Señor Schiebelhut. Not like Ramón Otero. Hmph!” Sauzas was reaching for his cigarettes, before he had even removed his overcoat. “A miserable man, señor.”
“They’re absolutely sure he’s not guilty? Everybody who examined him?”
“Yes,” Sauzas said, nodding. “Some more sure than others, but sure!” he added, smiling. “We have a lot of such cases in police work, but usually they are total strangers. I didn’t even bother to tell you that one old man who looks too old to—to look at a girl, much less rape her, confessed to the crime a couple of weeks ago. He had read a few details in the newspapers. He is an old man without family, without a job—destitute!” Sauzas shrugged. “No, Ramón is not guilty. His behavior is not that of a guilty man. Nor was it on the night of the murder. He had not seen the body before he walked in there that night.”
Theodore looked at him and tried to believe, just to see how it felt to believe. Sauzas had seen many more criminals than he had. Sauzas has no reason to say Ramón was innocent if he were guilty.
“Now, Señor Schiebelhut, I think I must go more extensively into your circle of friends. I can understand your reluctance to mention their names, but I would like to get to the bottom of the postcard.”
“So would I. I suppose it is barely possible that a friend or an acquaintance wrote it, Señor Capitán, but I can’t believe that anyone I know could be guilty of the murder. There is a difference!”
At that moment Inocenza came in from the kitchen and busied herself at the sideboard by the dining-table.
Sauzas looked her over. “Is she married?” he asked Theodore after she had gone again, doubtless to stand behind the swinging door of the kitchen.
“No.”
“Does she have many men friends?”
“Almost none. There is one friend in Toluca named Ricardo. A quiet fellow who has worked for the same man for years, I think.”
Sauzas pulled a paper and pencil from his jacket pockets. “Do you know his full name?”
Theodore turned to the kitchen. “Inocenza? Would you come in, please?”
Inocenza came in, looking attentively at Sauzas. Theodore was sure she had heard the question, but he repeated it.
“Ricardo Trujillo,” she replied. “His padron is José Cerezo, but I do not know the address by heart.”
Sauzas wrote the names down. “Do you have any other—friends?” he asked, using the masculine form of the word.
Inocenza blinked modestly and smiled. “No other friends, señor.”
Sauzas looked doubtfully at Theodore.
“It is true, I think,” Theodore said.
Sauzas seemed to drop the subject reluctantly. “Very well. Now, señor—I have spoken to about twelve of your friends already—and in the last days I have seen a few of them again in regard to the postcard.”
“You may go, Inocenza,” Theodore said.
Inocenza turned and went.
Theodore and Sauzas sat down on the sofa, and in the next few minutes Theodore racked his brains for more names and at last mentioned Elissa Straeter, too. He went upstairs to get his address book from his desk. Sauzas shouted up the stair-well:
“Señor! If you perhaps have a photograph album. That would be a help.”
Theodore came back with his blue address book and his thick photograph album bound in antelope skin. Sauzas excused himself perfunctorily and spent several minutes browsing through the address book, which contained the names of people who lived in Europe and North America, too. He copied down many names and addresses.
“We must be patient, you know,” Sauzas said. “With the people who have typewriters, we must make a sample to compare with the postcard.”
“What did you hear from Inés Jackson in Florida?” Theodore asked.
“She does not recognize the typewriter. We sent her a photostatic copy of the postcard.” Sauzas shrugged. “She wrote a very intelligent letter back. She was shocked. But she does not know who could have written it.” Sauzas’s head was bent over the album as he spoke. “A photograph album sometimes refreshes the memory.”
Painfully true. Half the pictures at least were of Lelia, because he had bought the album since he had met her, and he had saved comparatively few old pictures from Europe, the United States, or South America. Theodore did not let his eyes rest on any of the pictures of Lelia, but Sauzas peered at them and commented on her good looks.
“And who is this? . . . And who is this?” Sauzas kept asking, and Theodore told him who everyone was, with a few exceptions of people he could not remember in group photographs.
At last Sauzas had so many names he began to be selective.
“What do the psychiatrists advise should be done with Ramón?” Theodore asked.
“Ah!” said Sauzas, as if this were a totally different subject. “Quién sabe? He is not insane, no, but he has a kind of obsession. He is a very religious man, is he not? Almost all the time he was in his cell, you know, he was on his knees praying.”
“No. I didn’t know.”
“What religion is yours, señor?”
“I was brought up a Protestant.”
“Um-m, naturally. Well—” Sauzas said with a deprecating shrug, as if to say Theodore would not possibly be able to understand how Ramón felt. “Some psychiatric treatment might help him, but he does not like psychiatrists
.”
“I know.”
“Nor do I very much. Well—it is a terrible thing, you know, to live with a murder on the conscience and not to have committed it!”
Theodore said nothing, but he was not sure Ramón had not committed it. Perhaps he would never be sure. And maybe that was his fate, to be doubtful and undecided about everything. But this matter was tremendous. Compared to it, all the other unresolved questions in his mind seemed mere debating games. And he was paralyzed by the conviction that any other man would know what to do in an instant and would be able to take a stand.
“You are worried about him, señor,” Sauzas said.
“If he is really innocent—if he is just a man who needs help—”
“I’m not sure you could help him. Perhaps it would take a doctor after all.” Sauzas’s short thumb rubbed the antelope cover of the album sensually. “Or he should go back to work—since he hasn’t the money for a sea voyage.” Sauzas chuckled.
“Why do you think he confessed, Señor Capitán, if he did not do it?”
“Perhaps a way of getting attention. Perhaps for something else on his conscience.” Sauzas looked calmly at Theodore, and it was plain that he did not much care why Ramón had confessed.
Theodore tried to think of any previous behavior of Ramón’s that might help to explain his confessing. Sauzas’s presence rattled him. He sat there coolly professional, not caring about the why of anything. Theodore knew Ramón took his weekly confessions to the Church very seriously, and now he wondered if Ramón had ever invented in the confession-box sins and misdemeanors he had not been guilty of. “What did Ramón do when he found nobody believed his confession?”
“Oh! Just what they all do! He stuck to his story. He thinks we’re all wrong. He prayed for our souls on the floor of his cell!” Sauzas chuckled.