A Game for the Living by Patricia Highsmith Page B

against her slayer, who now, as he looked at Ramón, seemed to him could have been no one else.
    Olga Velasquez patted his arm gently. People were stirring. The service was over.
    â€œLook at Ramón,” Olga said. “Don’t you want to go and speak to him?”
    Ramón had hidden his face in his hands, and Arturo was standing by, trying to comfort him.
    Theodore set his teeth and could not move. A woman he did not know touched his arm and said something to him. Theodore moved in the direction of his car, a way that took him closer to Ramón. Olga came with him. Three or four people stopped him to clasp his hand and to say a few words of sympathy—rather as if he had been her husband, Theodore thought.
    â€œI shall write you a letter very soon,” said the man with the walrus moustaches, pressing Theodore’s hand, and Theodore suddenly recognized him as Sanchez-Schmidt, a wealthy art collector and honorary curator of several museums.
    Finally, Theodore stood hardly more than a yard away from Ramón. He did not want to speak to Ramón, but people expected him to speak to him. “Ramón?” Theodore said.
    Ramón looked at him dully, out of wet eyes. “I wanted to speak to her parents. Where are they?”
    Automatically, Theodore looked around, though he was not sure he could recognize them. He had seen them only once in Veracruz.
    Ramón was already moving towards the large, graying man in the black overcoat and his much shorter wife, who were surrounded by people. Theodore, after a glance back at Olga and the Hidalgos, who were waiting for him, followed Ramón and Arturo Baldin. After all, he thought, he should speak to her parents, too.
    â€œI did not do it,” Ramón was saying in a desperate whisper to the solemn, resigned pair. “I do not want you to think that I did do it.”
    Theodore looked at Ramón to see if he were possibly drunk, but he was not. “Señora and Señor Ballesteros,” Theodore interrupted Ramón. He shook their hands, bowing a little over each. “We are all devastated by this. I want you to consider me your friend. Your daughter was very dear to me.” He was conscious that his Spanish was not adequate for the occasion, that something as simple as this was perhaps not fitting. He saw tears in the man’s grey, brown-speckled eyes that were so embarrassingly like Lelia’s.
    â€œ Gracias, ” said the man.
    â€œI want you to know that I’m innocent,” Ramón pleaded.
    â€œOh, Ramón,” Theodore said quickly, “I don’t think they—”
    â€œI have to be believed!” Ramón said, shaking off Arturo’s hand on his arm.
    â€œHe is more upset than any of us,” Arturo said gently to the parents, and Lelia’s father nodded, obviously wanting to be gone.
    â€œLelia was very fond of me,” Ramón said. “I was falsely accused. You understand that, don’t you?”
    â€œYes, of course,” said Lelia’s father, whose friends were now pulling at him to leave.
    â€œWe understand,” said Sra. Ballesteros dully, as if who had murdered her daughter did not matter at all, at least not at this moment, only the fact that she was dead. They had one other child, also a daughter, but she had married and gone to South America. Lelia had been their favorite.
    Ramón stared at them, unsatisfied. “May I come to see you in Veracruz?”
    With a sigh, Lelia’s mother tried to muster her good manners. “We shall always be glad to see you, Ramón.”
    â€œAnd you believe me innocent, don’t you?” Ramón asked again, clutching at Señor Ballesteros’s shoulder.
    â€œI’m sure they believe you, Ramón,” Theodore said, trying to end the general embarrassment, though at that moment it occurred to him that an innocent man did not protest so much and that this thought might be in the minds of the