Ask for Me Tomorrow

“Yes.” I agree again. This time it’s real.

“As you can see” — the superintendent pointed to the table with the opened bottle of wine and the two glasses — “Hernandez was preparing to offer his visitor a drink. Which indicates that either he was a friend or he had come on a friendly mission such as bringing Hernandez something, a gift, say.”

“Say a mordida.”

“All right, a mordida. I don’t like the word but it is a fact of life so we’ll use it. Certainly we can assume that Hernandez was expecting someone, if not this particular person, because he left the gate open and no one is on duty in the gatehouse at night except on special occasions. So the caller arrived. Let’s call him Lockwood.”

“Let’s not.”

“Very well — Mr. Mordida, then. How’s that?”

“Better.”

“Mr. Mordida drove up to the house and Hernandez let him in. It was obviously an informal visit. Hernandez was wearing a paisley print robe over white silk pajamas. He brought Mr. Mordida here into the office and opened a bottle of wine. Up to this point the meeting was amicable. What happened to change it, I don’t know. The children and servants occupy another wing of the house and most of them were sleeping. Mrs. Hernandez heard nothing, no car driving up, no sounds of quarreling or of the office being ransacked. This isn’t surprising, since the adobe walls are a foot thick and she was in the bedroom watching television. Shortly after ten o’clock she came to say good night to her husband and found him dead and the room looking like this. She telephoned the doctor, who in turn called me. I came right out with Ganso, my photographer, and several other men. I’ve been on duty ever since, both here and at the hospital where Hernandez’s body was taken to determine the cause of death. There were no marks on him, he gave every evidence of having died naturally of a heart attack or a stroke. Except for the condition of the room, we might have left it at that. Would you like to see some of the pictures Ganso took of the body?”

“Not particularly.”

“Ganso likes to take pictures of everything. No one ever looks at them, which is a shame because the film is expensive. Are you sure you—?”

“I’m sure.”

“Very well, I’ll proceed. When Hernandez’s robe was removed at the hospital I noticed a very small spot of blood on the back of his pajama top. It seemed a peculiar place for a bloodstain. If it had been on the front it could have passed as the result of a shaving nick or even a dribble of red wine which, as you can see, Hernandez fancied. After I drew the doctor’s attention to the spot he examined Hernandez’s back very carefully and found, under the left shoulder blade, a puncture wound made by an extremely thin sharp instrument, something in the nature of an icepick. But I don’t believe it was an icepick. You see the forced-air opener still in the cork of the wine bottle over there? I think before it was inserted in the cork, it was inserted in Hernandez. The wound was so small that the skin closed over it almost immediately and all the bleeding, except for that one drop, took place internally. Death occurred fairly quickly, since the weapon penetrated the heart and the pressure of blood in the pericardial sac caused the heart to stop beating. I’m not a medical expert, I’m merely repeating roughly what the doctor told me. Whoever struck the blow was either very lucky or very skillful.”

“Lockwood was neither,” Aragon said. “All his luck was bad and his only skill seems to have been attracting women.”

“That sounds to me like good luck.”

“Not for him.”

“I could use such luck, call it good or bad.” The superintendent stared down at his belly as if he were wondering how it got there. “This Lockwood, he was probably thin?”

“No. In the only pictures I saw of him he was quite fat.”

“Tall?”

“No.”

“But very handsome?”

“No.”

“That’s most encouraging, a small fat homely man attracting many women. Yes, I like that very much, it tempts me to view you in a much friendlier light. But such a thing would be unprofessional. I am always professional.”

“I can see you are.”

“It shows, then?”

“It shows.”

The superintendent sat down in the swivel chair behind the desk and Ganso immediately took a picture of him. There was complete silence while the film was developing. The finished product showed a small homely fat man.

The superintendent gazed at it soberly. “I must keep reminding myself of Lockwood and all those women. Were they nice sensible women, the kind a man would choose to marry and to bear his children?”

“I only know one of them. She’s—” He wasn’t sure that “nice” and “sensible” were the right words to describe Gilly. “She’s very interesting.”

“Why has she not formed an attachment to some other man?”

“She did. Or at any rate she married him.”

“How is it, then, that she wants you to find Lockwood?”

“Her present husband is dying. I think she is afraid of being left alone.”

“How old is she?”

“About fifty.”

“I am not interested in any woman beyond childbearing age.”