Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000

Reyes was behind the bar. He waved to me hopefully, but it had been another long day. I went to my room — up a flight of stairs only a little more evolved than a ladder — and climbed out of my suit. I opened the case and set the painting on the washstand. Then I lit a Lucky Strike and settled in for some art appreciation mixed with self-recrimination. Three cigarettes later, I still hadn’t thought of the magic words that would have made Racine acknowledge the painting. But I’d convinced myself that she’d painted it, that she’d denied it for the same reason she’d tortured Jose. Because it had pleased her to.

I gave it up then and went to sleep, making up for all the tossing and turning I’d done on the train the night before. The room was lit by a predawn glow when I awoke, but it wasn’t the light that broke the spell. It was the sound of a woman screaming.

I was on my feet before I realized it, struggling into my pants and heading out the door before I made sense of something I’d seen in the room. I mean, something I hadn’t seen. The rose painting. The washstand where I’d propped it up now held nothing but my shaving kit.

By the time I realized that, I was stumbling down the crude staircase. The screaming was still building to a crescendo when I arrived in the cantina’s main room. The source was the woman who had catered Reyes’s engagement party the evening before. She was standing at the end of the bar, over a figure spread-eagled on the floor. Paul Reyes, dead.

I thought I’d have to slap the woman to break through her terror, but one look at me shut her down completely. That and the arrival of another recent sleeper, who turned out to be her husband and Reyes’s relief bartender. While she stammered to him in Spanish, I examined their late employer.

My lightning assessment of his condition had been based in part on his eyes, which were open and fixed and dull. The second clue was the knife planted in his chest. It was a carving knife from a very nice silver service. A service I recognized, oddly enough. The heavy handle ended in a turquoise orb, like the flatware I’d used at dinner.

“She just found him like that,” the husband said to me. “She didn’t touch him.”

“Good. Where’s the nearest law?”

“Española.”

He went off to make the call, taking his wife with him. I stayed behind to watch Reyes and let my pulse settle. I also gave the knife a second look. It was driven in perpendicular to Reyes’s chest. Exactly so. I checked the bloodstained cloth above and below the blade for some sign that the blow had actually been delivered at an angle, but there was no telltale slit in the fabric.

The bartender came back sans wife. He opened a fresh bottle of bonded whiskey, which he took from beneath the bar. I guessed it to be the owner’s private stock. He poured us each a stiff drink, and we knocked them back without speaking.

I left him to handle the second round alone. I climbed up to my room and searched it for the painting. It was still gone.

6

By L.A. standards, the turnout was light. Two sheriff’s deputies rolled in, followed by the sheriff himself, who was followed in turn by a crack forensics team: a country doctor and a fingerprint man from Santa Fe. The latter found lots of prints around the bar, including mine, but nothing on the knife handle, whose twisted design made it less than an ideal surface. The doctor wasn’t much more help. He said only that Reyes was still dead and that it had probably happened closer to the bar’s midnight closing time than dawn.

I was front and center through most of the preliminary investigation, being the man who had found the woman who had found the body. I was also the guy who had lost an expensive painting around the time Reyes was losing his life, a coincidence even an average sheriff would note.

My sheriff was better than average, from what I saw of his early work. At least he wasn’t prone to posing or bossing people around for the sake of it. His name was Gentry, and he was ex-World War II issue, which is to say, my age. He had a Dick Tracy jaw, which he carried slightly raised, and blue eyes almost as pale as Ella’s, which he wore wide open.

After Reyes had been carted off, Gentry joined me for a late breakfast in a quiet corner of the cantina. The huevos rancheros were served by my friend the screamer, whose name turned out to be Martha. We were pals, Martha and I. I’d shown up when she’d needed me, and she’d gotten me off the hook with my conscience. She’d done it by telling Gentry that the fatal carving knife belonged to Gladys Glenn Racine. Martha was very familiar with the fancy cutlery, her sister being Racine’s wrinkly cook.