Jeopardy Is My Job. Marlowe Stephen

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СКАЧАТЬ the table, helped his wife to her feet and walked off into the darkness with her. The lady bullfighter told Andrea Hartshorn, “It started at your party, you know.”

      “I know, Marcia. I saw.”

      “Fernando wouldn’t spit on the best part of her. But then, she really oughtn’t to have hurled her drink at me.”

      Then the blind man got up. He looked about forty-five with long dark hair going gray, a handsome broad-cheekboned face, and shoulders like a weight-lifter’s. His eyes had the blank stare of the blind.

      “Me gusté la fiesta,” he told Andrea Hartshorn.

      “Me alegro mucho,” she said automatically. I’m very glad. Then the blind man and his bullfighter wife left, his hand on her forearm. I heard the buzz of conversation at the tables around us again.

      “I like your friends,” I told Mrs. Hartshorn.

      “Marcia and Fernando are nice. She was born on Malta, her parents were Yorkshire and she used to be a bullfighter at the local férias like the one in Fuengirola. She was gored, and that ended it. Fernando is a local product. He was an artist, and not at all bad. He went away for a year—let me see—about three years ago, and came back to Torremolinos blind. No one knows how. He isn’t talking. He turned to sculpture, and he makes a pretty good living at that too. Marcia married him two years ago.”

      “No. I meant the other ones.”

      “They claim to be independently wealthy. Huntington’s an old New England name, and they claim a bloodline clean back to the Mayflower. Talk is he’s really on a government pension. But they do manage to live well. Half the time she’s as snooty as a duchess and the other half she chases anything in pants. Not that Fernando isn’t attractive.” Liquor or the scene we had witnessed finally had loosened Andrea Hartshorn’s tongue. “Lots of women are attracted to that combination of virility and helplessness. Anyhow, Stu Huntington wears the biggest pair of horns in Torremolinos, and they grow them pretty big around here as you may have guessed. There’s talk he gets his kicks that way and is a stallion in bed after one of Nancy’s sordid little escapades. Or am I shocking you?”

      “I’ll never be the same,” I said. “Aren’t there any secrets around here?” I answered my own question, “Yeah, there’s one. Why, how, and where your husband vanished.”

      “Maybe now you can see why I don’t want to talk.”

      “Then that’s your mistake. If a private eye didn’t respect his clients’ confidence, he wouldn’t be in business very long.”

      Mrs. Hartshorn looked at me. “I can use a drink. Fundador. A double.”

      I ordered two of them. She put hers back in one enormous gulp while I savored mine and watched the expression change on her face. Fundador was Spanish brandy, mellow and smooth. The blonde’s expression changed from worried to doubtful to certain in as much time as it took me to finish my drink.

      “The other person involved,” she said, “is Tenley.”

      “That’s the Governor’s granddaughter, right?”

      “I wish you hadn’t put it that way. Tenley’s my daughter, after all.”

      She was right, of course. I said, “The Governor’s always talking about her. He sent her to school in Switzerland, didn’t he?”

      “Geneva, yes. He dotes on Tenley because he’s disappointed in Robbie. But he’s worried too, because he thinks she’s wild.”

      “What do you think?”

      “I think she’s full of life. I also think Switzerland was a mistake. I can raise my own daughter,” Mrs. Hartshorn said angrily. “She wasn’t wild until—until after that finishing school in Geneva. Kids from broken marriages go there. So what if they’re rich? But Robbie and me—”

      I didn’t want her going maudlin on me, now that she was talking. I said, “How is she involved?”

      “There’s a bullfighter. Not a torero, really, because he was trampled once and his leg was broken and now he can’t work close to the bull. But he’s really terrific with banderillas. His name is Ruy Fuentes. Robbie thought Tenley was having an affair with him.”

      “What do you think?”

      “Tenley’s a good girl,” she said frostily. “Fuentes lives in Fuengirola. He’s quite young, only twenty-one or -two. Two weeks ago Robbie took the bus to Fuengirola to talk to him.”

      “Just talk to him?”

      “Well, thrash him maybe. Robbie could do it. He’s got a temper, and he’s strong. He never got there. Or if he got there, Fuentes lied and said he never got there. And that’s it, Mr. Drum.”

      “Where’s Tenley now?”

      “In Fuengirola for the féria. Bullfighting is one of her two passions. The other one is skiing. She learned that in Switzerland.”

      “She’s there by herself?”

      “Is that some kind of an insinuation?” Mrs. Hartshorn said hotly.

      “Just a question.”

      “Then yes. By herself because she can take care of herself.”

      “You tell the Guardia about Fuentes?”

      “How could I? Tenley’s only nineteen. It would be all over Torre before I could blink my eyes.”

      “Some Guardia,” I said.

      “They trade information for information. Real-estate men, hotel conserjes, bodega proprietors, members of the dear old fraternity of remittance men who don’t like the way you mix a martini—everyone and everyone’s best friend can be an informer in Spain. That’s something you come to accept. Will you go to Fuengirola?”

      Money or sex. In a disappearance there’s usually a pattern. This time it looked like sex—with nineteen-year-old Tenley Hartshorn up to her bullfighting passion in it.

      I nodded. “And thanks for your trust.”

      Then her face crumpled. “Find Robbie. Find him. I love him. I’ve been so frantic.”

      chapter two

      It takes an expert to tell the work of a superb matador from the work of a merely adequate one who knows his limitations and is in there to punch his time clock and collect his pesetas, but you don’t have to be an afficionado with a seat in the sun and a Hemingway beard and a wineskin slung over your shoulder to separate the men from the boys when it comes to the dangerous skill of charging at a tangent into the path of a galloping bull and planting a pair of barbed spikes called banderillas in the ridge of muscle behind its huge head.

      Ruy Fuentes was a banderillero. I first saw him plying his deadly trade the next afternoon in the bull ring at Fuengirola. His job, like that of the picador who sat astride a padded and blindfolded nag and wore armor from the waist down, was to weaken the bull, and particularly the ridge of muscle on the bull’s neck, for the sword of the matador. Ruy Fuentes wore an СКАЧАТЬ