Black Alibi Read Free Page A

heard. And when a Latin crowd hisses you, it’s like bricks and rotten eggs up North.
    A very disheveled, discredited, and thoroughly unnerved lady was driven away from the scene of the fiasco.
     
    It had been plainly seen to enter that alley at the Alameda end, by dozens of people. There could be no doubt on that point. It was a chasm of a lane, winding its way back through derelict buildings. This was an old section in here, one of those leftovers that dot all large cities, in spite of its proximity to the fashionable and ultramodern Alameda.
    It should, then, have been simply a matter of following it through to the other side, overtaking it, and holding it at bay—if not physically recapturing it—until the police had a chance to arrive. At least in keeping it in sight, if nothing else.
    It wasn’t.
    It was dusk, but the visibility was still fairish, even if dark-blue-tinted. The distance to be traversed wasn’t long. Not only that, but the more venturesome spirits in the crowd that had been around Kiki at the Globo, Manning at their head, were only moments behind it in pursuit.
    Yet it had dropped from sight, been swallowed up, disappeared completely somewhere along that short byway, in one of the most built-up, hemmedin parts of the city! For when the advance posse, Manning still foremost, came surging out into the Plaza de los Mártires, a small, busy, palmbordered square that the alley gave onto at its other end, a case of mass astigmatism seemed to have resulted. And it was not one brought on by fright and excitement, as sometimes happens, either. The plaza was bustling with people, yet not one person could be found who had seen or heard anything amiss, much less anything so striking as a jet-black jaguar rushing headlong out of an alley mouth into their midst. A shoeshine boy less than a yard past the turn of the alley corner was kneeling industriously to his task over a customer’s raised foot. Both were close enough for the wind of its passing to have bowled them over. If it had passed. Nothing had, they both said in surprise. And then, not sure they had heard aright, repeated blankly, “A what?”, thinking Manning and the rest crazy.
    Farther on, but not much farther on, the usual little knot of hopeful loiterers were scanning the lottery lists. People were getting on and off the noisy trolleys that seemed to fill this plaza at all hours of the day and night, emitting turquoise flashes from their overhead conduit wires as they backed and filled.
    It was—the way it always was.
    While the rearguard of the pursuit was still streaming in from the Alameda side, clogging up the lane, Manning and the advance guard tried to beat their way back through them, passing the word along as they went that it hadn’t come out at the other end.
    Three gesticulating, whistle-blowing—and very belated—gendarmes now arrived to take charge, and the chase—or rather problem, for a chase requires something in front of it—now became an official one. Their explanation for their tardiness, and not an unlikely one, was that the report had been utterly disbelieved when it was first made known to them. A holdup, yes. A knifing. But a live jaguar running amuck through the streets? This was Ciudad Real. You better go someplace and sleep it off, or I’ll run you in.
    Manning, momentarily leaving them to their own devices, buffeted his way straight through to the Alameda side again, to try to find the fellow from whom he had “borrowed” the thing earlier in the day, a ranch foreman named Cardozo, and who was supposed to meet him at a certain inconspicuous corner with one of the ranch produce trucks and take the thing off his hands again as soon as Kiki was through with it.
    It took him only a few minutes to get down there, but the news was already there ahead of him, he found when he arrived.
    “It’s gone,” he announced breathlessly. “It broke away from her, and nearly killed her in the bargain! That crowd you see up