Black Alibi Read Online Free PDF Page B

grubby, uptilted little slum lane her house faced. Not straight, but gradually curving. No sidewalks, just a middle of the way. A single wan lamppost gleamed dismally at the far end of it, leaving the rest in shadow. But she had to go down the other way, where there wasn’t any. There wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere on it. They were all indoors already at this hour. They worked too hard around here. To stay out at night, that was for the rich. On a night of fiesta, that was different. Or for the head of the house to step down to the cantina for a few hours, that also was a different matter. Even while there they were not Out Ofl the street itself, they were indoors.
    Well, it wasn’t far. She couldn’t get in again until she’d fetched it, so the quicker she did, the better. She struck out boldly from the doorway, moved down the middle of the road, arms tightly clasping her sides under the ends of her rebozo , eyes watchfully going from side to side in the oval gap it left for her face.
    She rounded the sort of blunted corner the alley made in turning in to join the next one below. For a moment she could glimpse the diluted, tawny light shining out from the inside of the tienda , down there ahead of her. This new thoroughfare continued the steady downward course her own had maintained. This whole quarter of the city had been built down a slope leading to the dried-up bed of what had once been a river.
    But right while she sighted it, as though it had only been waiting long enough for her to identify it, it went out. Old lady Calderón had closed up for the night. No system of clock entered into this; she couldn’t, as a matter of fact, read one, and didn’t have one, any more than any of the rest of them did. She closed up whenever there had been a long-enough lapse after the last customer to suggest that there weren’t going to be any more that night. Thus one night she might close at ten, the next at eleven, the next at nine.
    The girl gave a warning hail from where she was, to try to hold her at the door until she could get there; she began to run fleetly down toward it. She got there just too late; the padlock was on the inside. This being a depot that dealt in valuables such as sugar, candles, chick-peas, et cetera, it was kept locked during the night, unlike the domiciles around.
    She could still make out a faint gleam of candlelight coming from behind a hanging at the rear when she put her face close to the glass display window to one side of the door. Electricity for the front part of the store, candlelight for the living quarters at the back, that was the natural order of things, nothing surprising in that. She pounded her palm on the window hopefully.
    The hanging was withdrawn diagonally and old lady Calderón showed herself, already in a partial state of deshabille, which consisted of being barefooted and of a braid of platinum hair having been uncoiled from her head and allowed to dangle down in front of one shoulder.
    “I just want a little bag of charcoal for my father’s supper!” Teresa Delgado called through the glass between her hands.
    The tienda -keeper shook her head, motioned her away, while she continued working her way down to the bottom of the braid. “Manana.”
    “It’ll just take a second. While you’re standing there talking you could measure it out—” She held up the coin for her to see.
    “It means taking off the lock again, putting on the light, digging down in the sack. It’s too much trouble. Once I close I close.” The hanging fell vertical again, blotting her out.
    The girl turned away frustratedly. Now she’d either have to go home without it or she’d have to go all the way down to that other store, streets away, over on the other side of the viaduct. That was the nearest one there was to here. The viaduct was a parapet of solid masonry supporting a boulevard that crossed the former river bed at a height equal to its sides. You had to go through an arched