Wild Orchids (18 page)

"Senorita?" the policeman's voice was puzzled as he turned to see what had riveted her attention. He followed her eyes to the poster, and suddenly sat up straight.

"Is that the man, señorita? The man who kidnapped you?" He sounded excited. Without waiting for her reply, he spoke rapidly to the two other policemen, who jumped up with a scraping of chairs and crossed to join them at the desk.

Lora, tearing her eyes away from the poster with an effort, felt a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach. They were interested in what she had to say now… Whatever Max had done, he was obviously in big trouble. She couldn't add to it.

"No, no, it was just—just an interesting face…" Her words trailed off as it became obvious no one was listening. They were talking excitedly among themselves. One crossed to knock on a door at the rear of the room. A middle-aged man, obviously the others' superior, opened the door, barking an irritable question. The torrent of Spanish that answered him caused him to stare hard at Lora, vanish back inside the door for an instant, then emerge pulling on his uniform coat. Lora swallowed nervously as she watched him approach.

"Uh, never mind, I made a mistake. Isn't that silly? I…" Lora babbled, getting to her feet.

"Please sit down, señorita." The senior officer fixed her with a stem look.

Lora looked back at him, despairing, then sank back into the chair. Oh, Lord, what had she done?

"Now, señorita, suppose you start at the beginning. What is your name?"

Lora told him. What else could she do?

"You have identification?"

Lora wordlessly produced her driver's license from her purse. He studied it, then handed it back with a nod.

"Do you have knowledge of this man? This John Roberts Maxwell?"

So that was Max's full name. Lora registered this information as she looked apprehensively up into the senior officer's lined face. The way his sun-thickened skin folded back in on itself in a myriad of deep wrinkles around mournful brown eyes reminded her irresistibly of a basset hound. She only hoped that he had a basset hound's amiable disposition…

"No—I don't know anything about him."

"You claimed you were kidnapped, señorita. At least, according to Jorge, here." He indicated the policeman who had knocked on his door. "Is that not correct?"

"No, I—I was just—it was a mistake. A joke. Ha, ha!" Her explanation sounded unconvincing even to her own ears. The officer frowned.

"Senorita, lying to a police officer is a serious offense. Now, please, look at this picture and tell me if you have knowledge of this man."

At his gesture, the officer called Jorge took the poster from the bulletin board and handed it to Lora, who sat looking at it helplessly. The writing on it was in Spanish, so she was no wiser than before about the nature of Max's crimes, but the grainy photograph was, unmistakably, Max. She stared at it unhappily, wanting to kick herself for letting an unaccustomed surge of temper get her into this mess. Why had she ever come to the police in the first place? She did not want to get Max into any more trouble—or aid the police in finding him. But now that she had gone this far, she had to tell at least some of what had happened. Not to do so would mean getting herself in very big trouble, too. Lora took a quick glance up at the four men who formed a circle around her chair, staring down at her with identical frowns on their faces. These men meant business, she had no doubt.

"Senorita, I will ask you once more: is this John Roberts Maxwell the man who kidnapped you?" The senior officer's voice was stem.

Lora swallowed and nodded slowly. It was foolish, she knew, but she was going to fudge the truth a bit. If she could make them think that Max had left her the day before, maybe jumped out of the car in the middle of the jungle somewhere, then they would be no closer to the truth than they were now. Well, at least not much closer.

She nodded unhappily.

"Please tell me what happened." He gestured to one of the junior policemen, who, with a hastily muttered, "Si, capitan," dragged over his own chair and placed it in front of Lora with a flourish. The captain sat down, straddling the seat, folding his arms on the back of the chair and cradling his chin on his arms. His eyes never left Lora all the while.

Wetting her lips, Lora began a tangled account of her association with Max, most of which was at least partially true. She left out places and times, and most of the violence,and ended up describing how he had leaped out of the car in the middle of nowhere the day before and vanished into the jungle. When she had finished, the captain merely looked at her for a long moment. Then he lifted his head from his folded arms and sighed heavily.

"So you say this John Roberts Maxwell left you yesterday, and you are only now reporting the crime? Please tell me why that is, señorita?"

Those basset hound eyes were fixed on her face, and they were decidedly unamiable. Lora resisted the impulse to squirm guiltily beneath their unblinking regard.

"Because I was—afraid," she replied after the briefest of hesitations. "He—warned me not to go to the police." That much was the absolute truth. Lora didn't add that she fervently wished she had heeded his warning.

"Hmph." The captain, clearly dissatisfied with her story, stood up. He said something to his men. The third of the junior officers crossed to his desk and picked up the telephone, dialing. The others stood looking at her, faces identical in suspicion.

"Is—is that all? May I go now?" Lora didn't like the way they were looking at her. She rose nervously, lifting her purse from the desk where it had rested since she had showed the captain her identification, her eyes moving from one dark, unfriendly face to another.

"I regret, Senorita Harding, that we will have to keep you with us for a while. I hope it will not inconvenience you," the captain said.

"What do you mean, keep me with you? For how long?"

"Just until we check a few facts of your story." The policeman called Jorge spoke soothingly. "It should not take long."

"How long?" Lora felt panic rise in her throat. She had had experience with Mexicans' ideas of "not long."

"A day—two," he replied, while the captain said something to him in Spanish. "Until an officer of the Federal Judicial Police can arrive to talk with you. Then, I am sure, you will be free to go."

Lora was struck speechless at the idea of having to remain in the police station for the length of time that would probably take. At the rate things moved in Mexico, it could be several weeks, or a month! Or more… As she groped for the right words to persuade the captain of his error, Jorge took her arm and started to gently propel her from the room. Lora stared wildly around as she went with him. The captain had already vanished back into his office, and the other policemen were busy talking excitedly on the telephone. There was no help for her here…

Her feet dragged with reluctance as Jorge steered her through a door into a tiny, cell-like room. There was another metal door, which he unlocked. Then Lora found herself in a long corridor. Steel bars were set at intervals into a double row of cinderblock walls. Before Lora had properly assimilated the fact that she was being taken to jail, he had unlocked one of the doors and was pushing her gently, but firmly, inside.

"No—I want to talk to someone from the American Embassy! I want a lawyer! Please…" She grabbed frantically at the bars as he closed the door with a clang and turned the key in the lock. The steel bars were cold and unyielding beneath her grasping hands.

"You can't do this!" Lora cried as he turned away. "I am a United States citizen! You can't just lock me up for no reason! I demand to speak with an officer of the American Embassy!"

"Perhaps mañana," the response came floating back to her as Jorge let himself out of the cell block area. Lora, staring at the closing door with her head resting dispiritedly against the steel bars, could have wept.

Lora's half disbelieving apprehension turned to real fear as hours passed and no one came to tell her that it had all been a mistake and they were setting her free. Alternating with the fear was anger. She hadn't done anything, damn it! These suspicious-minded policemen were treating her like a criminal! Max was the criminal, while she was the victim of his crime. They did not seem to be able to make that distinction.

The jail itself was not nearly as bad as she had been led to believe Mexican prisons were. Perhaps because it was merely in a small town and not a government run detention center. In any case, the cell in which she alternately paced and sat was reasonably clean. The furnishings were meager, consisting of a thin mattress covered with a blanket lying on the concrete floor and a pail of water with a dipper. There was a primitive toilet in the corner, open to the view of anyone who happened to be passing in the corridor. Although no one ever was, so far Lora had resisted the urge to make use of the facility. The way her luck was running today, just as surely as she did one of the young policemen would come by.

She could hear other prisoners talking, laughing, and occasionally fighting among themselves. From their voices she deduced that she was not the only woman prisoner. At least, she heard what sounded like female voices. She supposed that she could count herself lucky that she had not been put in with the others, who were, as far as she could tell, either in one large cell or a group of adjoining cells. Apparently, she had been given special accommodations. Because of her nationality or the fact that she had not been charged with a crime, she did not know.

A single bare bulb in the ceiling provided illumination. It flickered on automatically when it got dark outside. No sooner had the light come on than Lora heard a rattling of keys, and the voices of the other prisoners picked up with interest and excitement. As hers was the first cell off the police station, she was afforded the first view of Jorge pushing a cart loaded with metal trays.

"Please—when are you going to let me out of here? I haven't done anything!" Lora rushed to hang onto the steel bars and look out at him with a mixture of pleading and anger. Jorge returned her look impassively as he picked up one tray and bent to shove it through a small opening at the bottom of the door.

"El capitán has sent to Mexico City for an officer of the Federal Judicial Police to talk with you. In the meantime, we no longer have the authority to do anything, even if we should want to. You will have to wait, as will we."

"For how long?" Lora was outraged, and her voice rose with it.

Jorge shrugged, already pushing the cart down the hall and out of her sight. "Who knows? It is in the hands of God."

"You can't do this! I haven't done anything! I demand that you contact the American Embassy! Or at least my hotel, so that they can call my sister. Are you listening to me?"

From the lack of reply, it became obvious that he was not. Lora felt like screaming, crying, picking up the metal tray with the unappetizing looking dinner and flinging it against the steel bars, but she did not. She had a feeling that she' would do better not to antagonize these policemen too much. It was being borne in on her with an awful sense of helplessness that no one, no one in the whole entire world who might be interested, knew where she was. These men could keep her imprisoned for days, weeks, months, even years, and no one would do anything because no one would know of it. This wasn't the United States, where one had a right to a speedy trial and no one was just thrown into jail and kept there for nothing. This was Mexico. She seemed to remember reading that one could be held indefinitely in Mexico without any charges being filed. The thought made her shiver. She had to get out of here—what could she say or do to make them see reason? Maybe if she told the whole truth about Max… No, she couldn't change her story now. That would only make them even more suspicious. Oh, why hadn't she listened to Max in the first place and stayed away from the police? Damn him anyway! This was all, every little bit of it, his fault!

When Jorge came back by her door with the now empty cart, Lora tried once again to reason with him. He only shrugged in reply, and went out, closing the door behind him. Lora heard the click as the lock went home. Trying to talk to these men was useless, she was beginning to realize. She would have to offer them something, anything—but what? Remembering the policeman at the roadblock, Lora decided that a bribe would probably work best. But, thanks to Max, she had no money. And she doubted that they would take a check, or her Visa… Disconsolately, Lora picked up the tray from the floor and carried it over to the mattress, where she sank down cross-legged and began to eat. As she halfheartedly chewed the stale tacos and cold beans that had been provided, she noted absently that she could already feel the concrete floor through the foam rubber cushion that could not have been more than two inches thick. Shirting in a futile effort to find a more comfortable position, she wondered what it would feel like to try to sleep on such a mattress.

Miserable was the answer, as Lora discovered fairly shortly. The lights went out immediately after Jorge came to collect the trays. (Lora didn't even try to talk to him this time, merely treated him to a sullen stare that didn't seem to bother him in the least.) Then there was nothing else to do but try to sleep. The other residents of the cell block apparently had reached the same conclusion, because soon only rattling snores punctured the darkness. Lora lay down on the mattress, wrapping herself in the threadbare blanket and trying not to despair. They couldn't—couldn't—hold her long. She was an American citizen! Tomorrow everything would look much better. Perhaps she could persuade the captain to let her go—or at least call the American Embassy, or even her sister. Janice would do something to help her, she knew, though she couldn't imagine precisely what. Contact their congressman? That could take years…

A rattling of keys and the sound of the lock in the door to the cellblock clicking open caught Lora's attention. She sat up, desperate for any diversion to take her mind off her situation. What was happening? she wondered as a flashlight beamed past her door, accompanied by the rumble of male voices speaking Spanish and the shuffle of feet. A late arrival? A nighttime bed check?