A Game for the Living by Patricia Highsmith

teeth, holding by the barrel the gun he had struck him with.
    â€œThat’s fine!” said Theodore, who reproached himself now for not having joined in the fight. “That’s going to do him a lot of good! Six men, and you have to hit him with a gun-butt!”
    Josefina was kneeling by Ramón, using the wet towel on his face. Ramón made feeble movements, as if he were fighting in a dream, but he did not open his eyes. His strong mouth looked calm and childlike.
    When Ramón came to a little, Sauzas asked more questions, which Ramón scorned to answer by so much as a glance at him.
    Then the door opened smartly, and Theodore jumped a little. A policeman he had not seen before came forward and saluted Sauzas. “The flowers were bought at a stand four streets from here,” the policeman said, a little out of breath. “They were bought between ten-thirty and eleven-thirty. The man is not sure.”
    â€œBought by whom?” Sauzas asked.
    â€œA small boy. About—this high, the man thinks. These are the only white carnations sold in the neighborhood last night to the number of two dozen, Señor Capitán.” The policeman’s face was tense and blank.
    â€œA small boy,” one of the men at the table echoed, and gave a low laugh.

CHAPTER FOUR
    A little before eleven, Theodore got out of a taxi and carried his suitcase and portfolio and roll of canvases to his front gate. He was accompanied by the fat police officer and one of the detectives. Ramón had been taken off to prison for further questioning by Sauzas.
    Theodore was irritated by the presence of the two men. They had stuck their noses in when he was talking with Josefina about the funeral arrangements for Lelia and had not offered the least assistance when he was searching on the street for a telephone to call an agencia funereal . All this had been most complicated, because the police were not through with the body. They wanted to measure the depth and width of the knife wounds and perform an autopsy besides.
    Theodore opened his mail-box, took out some letters, and pocketed them without looking at them. Señora Velasquez, who lived next door, had been forwarding his important mail to Oaxaca.
    He noticed that the ivy that overhung his iron gates needed water badly in the half nearest his house. Constancia, the Velasquezes’ maid, would have watered it from his first-floor window, but he had not given her a key. Theodore and the two men entered a patio paved with pinkish flagstones, at the back of which, under part of the second storey, was a garage. Theodore went on to a door at the side of the house for which he used his other key. The living-room was semi-dark, but Theodore’s eyes were everywhere, looking first at his plants—the big begonia looked as if it had died, and it was a shame—and at the furniture Inocenza had covered with sheets as he had asked her to do. He pulled a cord, and bright yellow sunlight filled the room. Then, ignoring the two men, he carried the begonia to the kitchen at the back of the house.
    He had soaked the plant before he left and stood it in a bowl of water, but it was a big semperflorens and drank half a litre of water a day. And now, as he soaked the dry pot, Theodore reproached himself for fretting like an old maid over a plant, when Lelia had been dead only twelve hours.
    He turned round and found the two men staring at him from the doorway of the kitchen. “Well, this is my house. You see that I have one.”
    â€œWhy did you go to Oaxaca, señor?” asked the fat officer slyly.
    â€œI went to paint, señor.”
    â€œYou must have left very suddenly, not to be able to take care of your plants.”
    â€œI do things when I want to.”
    â€œYou are a very careful man,” the officer continued, shaking his head. “You wouldn’t have left your house without preparation unless you had been in a hurry.”
    â€œYou have