They didn’t stir.
Acosta changed back to the receipt again. “Do you deny that this bill of sale was made out to you?”
That was dumb. They’d taken it right out of my own pocket, hadn’t they? “No, of course not. That’s my receipt, all right.”
“Then suppose you let me finish reading it to you. You didn’t give me time.” He went on: “ ‘Description — with handle carving of the monkey that sees no evil. Received payment, twenty pesos.’ ”
My jaw hung slack while that sank in. “No. He got it wrong on the receipt, that’s all!”
It was no good. “You have admitted you bought a knife. You have admitted this is the receipt for the knife you bought. There is the knife she was killed with in front of you. You admit that is the one, since it was projecting from her; you yourself withdrew it? All that is necessary, then, is for the three things to fit one another. Here is the receipt, from your own pocket, with your own name on it, that fits the knife she was killed with — ‘the monkey that sees no evil.’ The receipt fits the knife; the knife fits the wound. Therefore, the wound fits the receipt, and the receipt is made out to you.” He gave a shrug. “It’s simple. A complete circle without any opening.”
If it was, I went hopping around on the inside of it, trying to get out. “But I tell you I bought the knife of the monkey that hears no evil! This is somebody else’s knife! This knife fits the wound, and the receipt fits this knife, all right. But the receipt doesn’t fit the knife I bought. That’s a different knife! Can’t you get that through your heads?”
“Anglo-Saxon indirection,” he told me patronizingly. “You people always take the longest way around between two points. Just like you tangle up centimeters into fractions of inches.” He was going to convince me. He not only liked to arrest people; he liked to convert them to a sense of their guilt as well. He was going to show me what a tough spot I was in. I didn’t know. I was just passing time chinning with them in a bar because I didn’t have anything better to do.
“Suppose for the sake of argument we say it is somebody else’s knife — although it isn’t.” He spread his hands. “Then there is still one missing. Where is the one you say you bought? Where is the one you even told us how it was wrapped for you — in green paper, rubber bands? Where is the one you say you had in your pocket, that you stood there so surprised we didn’t take it out? Well? Where? You say there are two. It isn’t we who say there are two. We say there is one. We show you the one. You say there are two. But you can’t show us the two. Well, who is wrong — you or we?”
I was going slowly nuts. “It might have fallen out of my pocket in the carriage, in the place we ate, anywhere. We dined at Sans Souci and even got up a couple of times to rumba. It might have been then. How do I know? The pocket wasn’t deep enough to hold it — it overhung the lining — I saw that when I first stuffed it in.”
This brought on a burst of laughter when he had translated it for the benefit of the rest. One of them pinched the end of his nose tight, which means the same thing in any language.
Acosta addressed himself to me again. “It unwrapped itself first and then fell out. Skinned itself like a snake does, leaving the green paper and rubber bands behind in your pocket until you got here! Then they fell out by themselves. And meanwhile, of course, the receipt was for a different knife the whole time. That’s what storekeepers give out receipts for, to show which article you didn’t buy, and not which article you did buy.”
I tried to stop him, but he went right ahead. No Marquess of Queensberry rules in this kind of clinch.
“So the receipt was for a different knife. Then this different knife mysteriously shows up right here, out of all La Habana, at your feet in Sloppy Joe’s barroom, to catch up with its own receipt. It followed you around like a filing to a magnet, maybe, eh? You take the receipt out of the store first, and then the knife it belongs to gets up and floats out after you, drops here, ping! to the floor at your feet, after first sticking itself into the lady.” He made a windmill sweep of his arms. “Is this the kind of story you expect us to swallow? You think because you are in Cuba you can talk to us like a bunch of six-year-old kids? What kind of police you think we are down here, anyway?”
I said limply: “I’m all tangled up now. But here’s what I’m trying to get at. If I was going to kill her, why would I come into a crowded place like this to do it? We were alone in a carriage, driving along the sea wall in the dark, just before we came in here. One time we even stopped and sat there, looking at the harbor, and the driver got down and strolled off to stretch his legs. Why didn’t I do it there? Why didn’t I do it then?”
He had one for that too. And quick, without a hitch. “Because a crowd gives you more cover. The bigger the crowd, the bigger the cover-up. If you did it while you were alone with her, there could be no mistaking who did it. You and nobody else. Here, with people thick around you, you had a better chance to pass it off as somebody else’s doing. Like you are trying to.”
“But it was somebody else’s doing!” I clawed at my collar to get it out of the way, but my hand couldn’t make it, it still had too much tonnage fastened to it.
“I will show you why it couldn’t be.” He hadn’t had so much fun since his last promotion, I bet. “You will prove it for me out of your own mouth by answering three questions.” He matched three fingers to them. “How long had this woman been in La Habana?”
I’d already told them once. What was the good of going back on that now? “She got off the boat with me a little before six this evening.”
One finger went down. “Four hours ago!” He crowded in on me closer. “Had she ever been here before?”
I had to tell him the truth on that too; it would have been easy enough to find out later. “Neither of us ever had.”
The second finger went down. He had my kidneys pinned against the bar by now. “Did she know anyone here? Anyone at all, even at second hand, even by letter of introduction?”
The truth seemed to keep working against me. “No,” I admitted in an undertone. “Not a soul. No one at all.” That was why we’d come here.
The third finger went down. He was supposed to have me inside the fist that was left. Maybe he did, at that. “There’s your answer. Do you still want to claim somebody else but you killed her, in a place where she had just arrived, in a place where she knew no one, in a place where she had never been in her life before? Above all, with your own knife, taken out of your pocket and unwrapped before being used!”
There comes that knife again, I thought dismally.
They were ready to take her out now. I saw them taking off her rings and bracelets and things. I don’t know why they were doing it here instead of at the morgue or wherever it was they were taking her. Maybe they figured there’s too many a slip, even on your last ride, and she just might show up there without them.
All the shine, all the glitter waned and went out at her throat and ears and wrists and fingers. She was going to send them all back to him anyway, I thought. She didn’t want them. They’d cost her too much. More than he’d ever paid over any jewelry counter for them. They used to speak to her at nights from the top of the dresser and keep her awake, she told me. And even when she crammed them into a box and stuffed them away, to shut them up, she could still hear their faint whispers coming through. That was after she’d met me, when what she’d done with herself first counted. She hadn’t wanted them; she was going to get rid of them. But now they were here. And she wasn’t any more. Just that deflated white dress over there on those three chairs, so flat, so straight, so still.