Puzzle for Pilgrims (24 page)

“He might say that.”

She turned to me quickly. “I believe him.”

Anger spurted. “You! So goddam bedazzled!”

“No.” She shook her head. “No. Peter.”

“Then…?”

“That isn’t Martin. Not to kill people.”

“What is Martin?”

She looked down at her hands. “I don’t know. But not that.”

The anger went. The weariness came back, bleak, with promise of nothing. I saw now what my decision might do to me. Out in the impersonal streets, it had just seemed a way to get rid of Martin. It was different here. The spell was still on Iris. When I told her that Martin had to go, perhaps she would go too. Perhaps I would lose her forever. The enforced intimacy which danger had brought had made me forget that already I had faced the prospect of living without her and somehow mastered it. For the last weeks, grim as they had been, at least Iris had been physically there. Slowly, without my realizing it, the need for her had come back.

But the end of my tether was too near. I didn’t have the strength to be weak now, to let Martin stay for the useless comfort of having Iris near me.

I said, “I’m going to Martin now. I’m going to tell him he has to leave Mexico.”

She glanced up quickly. “Leave Mexico?”

“You can’t count on things. Anything might break. It’s far too dangerous. He has money, a passport. I’m going to make him take that boat to Buenos Aires tonight.”

She didn’t say anything.

Dragging the words out, I said, “Will you go with him?”

Her eyes met mine. Her face was stricken.

“Will you go with him, Iris?”

“No,” she said.

My hands were on my knees. My knees were trembling. Exhaustion. “Because you’re through with him?”

She laughed. “Through with him?”

“Then why?”

“Because I can’t.” She got up and moved away from me to the window, looking out at the uneventful view of roofs and tree tops. “Because I’m not
that
much of a fool.”

“Once you start making a fool of yourself, it’s easy to go on.”

“No. No, Peter. There comes a time.” She turned to me. I saw her silhouetted against the colorless early-morning light.

“I’ve become such a bitch. I’ve trampled on everything, my pride, you—everything. I’ve been worse than Sally, grabbing for him. And I never even got him. It didn’t begin like that. It began with me thinking I was sorry for him, thinking I was the strong one. The wise and beautiful Iris Duluth saving the genius from the monster.” She paused and added softly, “Who’s the monster now?”

She came back to the bed and sat down. She seemed to have brought some of the chilliness of the morning air with her.

“I can’t take any more. I lost everything, I know. But I’d rather be like this—with nothing—than have it that way with Martin, going on, on, on. I realized that tonight. I’ve drunk my fill of Haven.”

“It’s a bitter brew.”

She laughed. “He should start a school. The Haven School for Impairing Your Character and Losing Your Looks in Six Difficult Lessons. With a photograph of me in the prospectus. Iris Duluth Before. Iris Duluth After. Peter, look at me.”

“I’m looking,” I said. “You’re very beautiful.”

She shook her head. “No. I’m not beautiful. I’m not anything.”

I wanted to take her hand. I wanted everything to be simple again. It couldn’t be, of course.

I said, “I’m not much myself.”

“You.” She was angry. “You’ve done everything. You took care of that awful thing with Jake. You saved Martin. You saved us all.”

“Any guy could have done that.”

“No.”

“Yes.” I said, “What’ll you do after Martin’s gone?”

“Stay here perhaps. Go back to the States.”

“Alone?”

“Who else is there for me to be with?”

I wanted absurdly to say “There’s me.” But I couldn’t. I had other commitments now, commitments which should have made me happy as a carnival reveler because they were going to give me what I had always wanted. I had to tell Iris sooner or later. This was a rough moment to break the news, but we had got far beyond the stage of sparing each other.

I said, “Marietta wants me to marry her.”

As I said it, I saw the irony of it. This had begun with Iris leaving me for one Haven. It was ending with my leaving her for another Haven.

I think she was too much out of love with herself to feel the shock. She sat very quietly. “And you said you would? Marry her?”

“Yes.”

“When Martin’s gone, she’ll be rid of him.”

“Yes.”

She turned to me. “Go to Martin now. Get it over with. Get it done.”

I tapped on Martin’s door. It was open. I went in. He was in bed again in the white pajamas. He was asleep, one arm curled boyishly under his head. The yellow hair gleamed in the strengthening light which was almost sunlight now. I wasn’t surprised that he was asleep. I was too used to him. I had been saving his skin. Iris had been agonizing. Martin had been asleep.

I took the arm that circled his face and shook it. He stirred, rolled over, and opened the gentle blue eyes.

“Hello, Peter.” He smiled. “Everything work out?”

He spoke as if he had sent me on some frivolous mission. To change a pair of pants, maybe, that had been a size too large for him around the waist.

I said, “The doctor signed the death certificate. He thought it was a heart attack.”

He yawned, scratched through his hair with his hand and sat up. “So you were wrong about the poison. I always thought you must be.”

“No,” I said, “I wasn’t wrong.”

His eyes clouded. “Then…?”

“There’s nothing to worry about. I think we’ll get away with it. But we mightn’t. Something might happen. It’s best for you to leave.”

“Leave?”

“Leave Mexico. Right away. There’s that Argentine boat. You’ll be able to get the money at the bank today. You’ll be safer in Argentina for a while.”

I thought he was going to argue with me, but there was always a point beyond which he was smart enough to abandon his naiveté.

“You really think I should?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t kill Jake. I didn’t kill Sally. You know that.”

“We won’t argue about it.”

“But I didn’t.”

“Whether you did or not, the police are going to think so if anything breaks. You don’t want to go to jail, do you?”

“Of course not. Besides, I’ve got the book to finish.”

“Yes. Got a passport?”

“Yes.”

“Then…?”

“All right, Peter. I’ll go.” He grinned his quick, friendly grin. “I’ve always wanted to see Argentina anyway.”

“Interesting country, they say. Colorful.” This was the moment. I looked at him steadily. “Iris isn’t going with you.”

I had given up trying to anticipate Martin’s reactions. I had no idea what he would say. His face was solemn. The English prefect confronted with a problem that could affect the good name of the school.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think she should. It wouldn’t be good for her. Traveling with a man she’s not married to.”

“She won’t join you later either, Martin. She’s had enough.”

The blue eyes seemed faintly surprised. Certainly there was no stronger emotion. He said, “She’s going back to you?”

“No.”

He looked past me toward the sun-splashed window. “I suppose I’m a difficult man for a woman to be around. A writer, you know.”

“Yes.”

He turned back to me. “I hope she’s not too cut up.”

“I imagine she’ll get over it.”

The smile came again, warm, intimate, the schoolboy’s smile for his favorite friend. “You’ve been damn decent about it all.”

“Have I?”

“You’re not too disgusted with the way I behaved?”

“I guess I’m not.”

He looked relieved. “What time’s the boat leave, Peter?”

“This evening sometime.”

He dropped down against the pillow and pulled the bedclothes up over his slight body.

“Pretty tired. Think I’ll get a little more sleep.”

“Yes,” I said. “Why don’t you do that?”

I went back to Iris’s room. She was still sitting on the bed.

“He’s going,” I said.

She looked up. “You told him I wasn’t going with him?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he was pretty tired, better get a little more sleep.”

She laughed a sudden, small laugh. “That puts me in my place, doesn’t it?”

“You can’t tell with Martin. Maybe it’s a big shock to him.”

“It isn’t a big shock to him. It’s just another burden dropping off.”

I went to the bed. I sat down by her and took her hand. “More was lost at Mohatch Field, baby.”

Very softly she said, “Where the hell was Mohatch Field, Peter? I never knew.”

“I never knew either. But I guess a powerful lot was lost there.”

She said, “Did he say again that he hadn’t killed Jake and Sally?”

“Yes.”

“And you still don’t believe him?”

I hadn’t really thought about it one way or the other. For me, the problem of the two deaths had become a side issue, almost beneath consideration.

“I don’t know, Iris.”

“How could he have done it? You have to plan, to be ingenious, to get poison. Martin can’t even speak Spanish. Can you imagine him going into a Mexican drugstore and saying, “Give me some poison, please”?”

“I saw him give the capsule to Jake. There was poison in the capsule. Marietta watched Sally’s house. No one went in except Martin.”

I remembered then that I had the bottle of sleeping capsules in my pocket. I had picked them up when I had first gone to break the news of Jake’s death to Martin. I pulled it out. There were only five or six tablets left in the vial. I unscrewed the cap and let the tablets roll out onto my palm.

I said, “He undid the capsule, took out the powder, put in the poison, and fixed the capsule together again.”

I picked up one of the shiny capsules. I held it vertically and cautiously slid the top half off. The white powder was visible in the bottom half. I took another capsule and did the same thing. But, as I split the capsule, my hand suddenly shook. The white powder was there inside. It looked exactly like the other white powder in the first capsule. But there was a terrific difference.

Trading up to me from its interior came the distinct odor of bitter almonds.

I stared at Iris. “Prussic acid. Cyanide.”

Unsteadily, I fitted the capsule together again. I examined all the others. Three of them were normal. The fourth and last gave out that same, sweet, deadly scent.

A truth came to me then so staggering that it took some seconds for me to grasp its implications.

I said, “It wasn’t just the capsule Martin gave Jake. There were two more of them here in the bottle.”

Iris was watching me.

“They all look the same,” I said. “No one could possibly tell by looking which were poisoned and which weren’t. And all three of them were in Martin’s bottle. If he’d wanted to murder Jake, he’d have had a special capsule prepared on the side. He didn’t. He just rolled one out of the bottle. And there were two more…”

She whispered, “Then Martin
didn’t
murder Jake.”

“How could he have known which were poisoned and which not? And why the hell would he have had two more of them in his own bottle of sleeping pills, the bottle which no one else ever used?”

I said it then. “Don’t you see? Jake’s dying was a sheer accident. Those poisoned capsules were put in there for Martin. Martin’s the one who was meant to be murdered.”

It was hard when I was so tired and spent to have the whole pattern change again. I had grown to accept Martin’s guilt. I had shaped everything around that fact. Martin the destroyer who was to be sent away. Now where were we? Where did we go from here?

Iris’s eyes were fixed on my face. I saw my own weary confusion mirrored there.

“Then who, Peter? Jake?”

“Jake? Jake kill Martin when it was only through Martin that he could get his money? Jake let himself be killed in a trap he set for someone else? No, not Jake.”

She said, “Do you think I would want to kill Martin?”

“No.”

“Then there’s only one person, Peter.”

She took my hand. She said, “It’s better for you to know now, Peter. I tried to tell you earlier, but I couldn’t—not when you said you were going to marry her.”

I felt a cold tingle up my spine. “Tell me what, Iris?”

“When Martin told me he hadn’t killed Sally.”

“What do you mean?”

“He told me why he’d let Jake blackmail him, why he’d put up with all this horror. He hadn’t been the way we thought he was—just thinking of himself. He had a reason.”

She looked away from me. Very softly, she said, “He let Jake blackmail him. And now he’s ready to take the blame for both deaths and go off to Argentina. You see, he stands by her too. He’s just as tied to her as she is to him.”

“You don’t—”

“Yes. From the beginning he’s been certain that Marietta killed Sally.”

The cold seemed to be spreading all through me.

“Because Sally was alive when he left her,” said Iris. “And he saw Marietta waiting around outside the house. She could have gone back, you know.” She turned to look at me then, and her face was drawn with compassion for me. “I’m sorry, Peter. But, if she killed Sally, then she tried to kill Martin too.”

With tormenting clearness I thought of Marietta fighting against her obsession for Martin, knowing that she would be chained to him as long as he lived, seeing her one chance for happiness with me. Marietta, hating, loving, driven by furies, sneaking the poisoned capsules into Martin’s bottle so that Martin would die and she would have her release.

As always, the thought of Marietta brought with it a violent physical reaction. My blood felt like water. Everything in me rebelled against that explanation.

“No,” I said passionately. “No. Not Marietta.”

Iris’s hand was on my arm. There had been that crazy whirligig in time. She was comforting
me
now.

“There’s no one else, Peter.”

It was the extremity of my want that brought the sudden flash of insight. Like a prayer answered, the realization came that there had been someone else. With an inevitability that was almost uncanny, I saw the real solution, the only solution which brought in every detail and made a uniform design. It wasn’t Marietta. The realization seemed to sing in me. It wasn’t Marietta.