Talk of the town

  “Sure thing. It was a pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Chatham.”

  “You did a good job. If I get down to Miami I’ll look in on you and we’ll have a drink.”

  “Do that.”

  I went back out and got in the station wagon. I knew now who Strader’s girl friend was, for what it was worth. I couldn’t prove it. If I even said it aloud, I’d have my head blown off. She still didn’t have anything to do with Langston. And she still wasn’t the girl who’d tried to get me killed.

  Not yet, anyway.

  12

  It was a quarter to five when I turned in at the Magnolia Lodge and stopped in front of the office. Georgia Langston, dressed in slacks, was on a step-ladder painting the trim and supporting pillars along the porch.

  “I give up,” I said.

  She smiled and came down. She was wearing a Cuban or Mexican straw hat with an unfinished brim. “You can stop the fragile business as from now,” she said. “I went to Dr. Graham for the balance of that check-up this afternoon, and there’s nothing wrong with me at all. I needed about two days’ rest and I’ve had that.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “We’ll celebrate by going out for dinner. But come on inside; I’ve got something to tell you.”

  Josie had gone home. I stirred a pair of Martinis and we sat down in the living-room. “Hold onto your hat,” I said. “Cynthia Redfield was an old flame of Strader’s. She lived with him in New Orleans for about six months in 1954. After her first husband was killed in an accident that might not have been as accidental as it looked.” I told her the whole story.

  She put down her drink with a look of horror. “But—it seems so impossible. And why hasn’t anybody found it out before?”

  I lit a cigarette. “For a lot of reasons. The first being just what you said—it’s impossible. She’s not the type. Why should anybody even suspect it? The only thing she actually had to hide was the fact she knew Strader while she was there. The rest of it would be common knowledge—and harmless. The police here and in Miami checked Strader out, but this happened in another state. If it’d been an F.B.I, case, they’d have found it out, but it wasn’t. The only F.B.I, angle was whether he had a previous criminal record, which he didn’t. And, then, she’s married to Redfield. Who was going to raise the question?”

  “Do you think she was—the one that night?”

  “I don’t think there’s any doubt of it.”

  “But how can we prove it?”

  “We can’t,” I said.

  “Not ever? It’s horrible. It’s unbelievable—”

  “I know. But, look—-We could bring witnesses here from New Orleans—which isn’t easy, believe me—and all we’d prove was that she’d once known Strader. If I went to the District Attorney with a flimsy thing like that, he’d laugh in my face. And if I went to Redfield, he’d kill me.”

  She gestured helplessly. “What can we do?”

  “Nothing, on the basis of what we have now. There has to be more.”

  “More evidence?”

  “Any evidence at all would be more evidence,” I said. “What I mean is there has to be more to the case than the simple fact she was carrying on an affair with Strader. That’d obviously have nothing to do with your husband and yet they killed him. Why?”

  She shook her head wearily. “It’s insane.”

  “Listen,” I said. I asked you this once before, but I’ve got to ask it again, so don’t jump down my throat. Is there any chance at all your husband could have been involved with her?”

  “No,” she replied. “It’s absolutely inconceivable.”

  ”Try to be objective about it,” I urged. “Say that he’d found out what she was. That’s possible, you know. He might have seen her with Strader one of those other times, or she could have made a play for him—”

  “No,” she said firmly. “I just can’t buy it, Bill.”

  “Tell me a little about him.”

  She gazed moodily at the end of her cigarette. “He was a man who’d been almost wrecked, physically at least, and he’d just about finished rebuilding his whole attitude towards life. I say just about. He still had a little way to go, but he was closing the gap. Everybody up here thought he was ideally happy, of course, retired, with the motel to furnish him with an adequate living, and all the leisure he wanted to fish, but you don’t turn off drive and ambition that easily and just overnight. I was helping him, I think, and he needed me.

  “He’d lived most of his life like a steam engine with the safety valve tied down and the throttle wide open, and in the end, of course, it almost killed him. We met in a doctor’s office. A clinic, rather. I was the lab technician, and he was the patient of one of the men there, the cardiologist.

  “It was just after he and his first wife broke up. You might say I caught him on the rebound, except there really wasn’t much in the way of a rebound—he was going too fast and hit too many things all at once. A messy divorce and a big property settlement, a heart attack, and the loss of a lawsuit that almost wiped him out financially. However, if I’m giving you the impression I gathered up a bunch of pieces and tried to put them back together, I don’t mean to. The man was still there, more or less intact but just badly battered. He still had a sense of humor, most of the time, and he could get a perspective view of it—again, most of the time. He was being sentenced to live what he considered an old lady’s existence for the rest of his life if he wanted to have any rest of his life, and I simply helped him to do it. We liked each other from the first, and the things we did together were quiet things. His big fishing days were over, for instance, but we found we both liked to sail small boats. We liked to picnic, and lie in the water with masks and snorkels and watch sea life. Music bored him, but we both liked to read—Oh, I could go on, Bill, but what’s the point of it? He simply wouldn’t be capable of a thing like that. He had too much sense of decency, to begin with. And Redfield was a friend of his.”

  I smiled at her. “I’m not accusing him of it,” I said. “It’s just that in a thing like this you have to consider every angle. And God knows we’ve got few enough angles as it is.” I got up restlessly and walked back and forth across the room. It was so damned baffling. “Are you sure you told him about Redfield’s canceling the trip?”

  “Of course.”

  “And he understood?”

  “Bill, how on earth could anybody misunderstand a simple thing like that?”

  “Well, was he ever absent-minded? Could he have forgotten?”

  She shook her head. “No. And, anyway, the last thing before he left that morning he promised to be very careful because I was worried about his going alone. What is it you’re trying to find?”

  “Simply why he went to Redfield’s house that morning.”

  She stared. “Do you think he did?”

  “He must have. Wouldn’t you say that was where she and Strader were?”

  She frowned. “In her own home? In—?”

  “Yes. In case you haven’t been able to grasp it yet, this girl’s not the finicky type. I think that’s where they were, and that’s where it happened.”

  “But why?” she asked piteously.

  “I don’t know,” I said. It made no sense at all except for the fact the three of them had to come together somewhere in that tragic fifteen minutes and he was the one who was in motion, so he must have gone there. But then, even if he had, why the killing? The situation might have the ingredients for explosion, but only if she were utterly stupid or insane. All she’d have to do would be to go to the door and tell Langston her husband wasn’t home.

  There had to be more to it. A lot more. There was another man, to begin with. There was the acid job and the deliberate attempt to drive Georgia Langston out of her mind or break her health with those filthy phone calls. Why? Say that Cynthia Redfield had tried to frame her and had failed—her only object would have been to throw suspicion off herself, and she’d succeeded in that. Why keep lashing a dead horse? Sad
ism? Was she a complete mental case?

  “We’re just beating our brains out,” I said. “We’re going to forget it for tonight. We’ll have dinner together and not mention it once.” Then I remembered the way I looked. “That is, if you don’t mind being seen in public with this open-toed haircut, and bandage.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” she replied with a smile that was only a little forced.

  * * *

  Around six-thirty I shaved and put on the lighter weight of the two suits I had. It was a San Francisco job, a gray flannel, and still no prize in this heat. I examined the result in the mirror, with the fresh white shirt and dark tie, and decided I looked like a well-tended moose even if a little like one that’d just walked into the props of a D.C.-7. Well, I could wear the hat, and we might find a place with table booths. The Steak House—that was it.

  I went across to the office. She called from beyond the curtained doorway that she’d be ready in just a moment. I sat down in one of the bamboo chairs and thumbed idly through a magazine. When she came out she was wearing a very dark green dress, darker than avocado, that aided and abetted the creamy pallor of her face and throat and the mahogany highlights of her hair. She wore small gold ear-rings like sea-shells, and a gold sea-horse pin, and nylons and some very slender high heels.

  I stood up. “Woof,” I said. “You can quote me.”

  She gave an exaggerated curtsy. “Why, thank you.”

  “You’re entirely too lovely to waste on the peasants,” I said. “Why can’t we go to Miami Beach for dinner?”

  She grinned. “No reason in the world. Except it’s a thousand-mile round trip and I’m hungry.”

  “Well, we could have breakfast before we start back.”

  The gray eyes were cool and appraising, though there was still humor in them. “Tell me, Bill, was that an honest proposition, or are you still conducting an investigation?”

  “That’s not fair and you know it,” I said. “It was a perfectly honorable pass, from the bottom of my heart. Futile, maybe, but—Call it a gesture. Call it art appreciation.”

  She laughed delightfully, and we went out to the car feeling wonderful in a lightheaded sort of way, as if we’d had two quick Martinis. It was a bubbly sort of moment, the first one since I’d been here that was completely free of the tensions and ugliness that bore down on her. It didn’t last, however. I found a place to park on an intersecting street around the corner from the restaurant, and we had to run the gauntlet of hard, unfriendly eyes and blank stares, moving in our own little corridor of silence along the walk. When we were inside, people glanced up at us, and looked away, without speaking to her. We found an empty table near the back and sat down, and she still managed a smile.

  I reached across the table and took hold of her hand. “Don’t let it throw you,” I said. Then I realized how asinine it was. She’d been taking it for seven months completely alone, and now she needed my nickel’s worth of backing. “I wish I had your poise,” I added.

  She shook her head. “Don’t you dare go solemn on me. Let’s have a Martini.”

  We had a Martini and admired the polished steer horns on the wall above us and wondered why they were never bull horns or cow horns or ox horns. Would the day ever come when horns would stand or fall on their own merits, without sex?

  “What is an oxen?” she asked.

  “An oxen is two or more ox,” I replied.

  She wrinkled up her nose at me. “Well, what are they? Are they any different from steers?”

  “Not in any really worthwhile way,” I said. “At least, from the Freudian point of view. I think it’s only occupational. If they worked, they were oxen.”

  She propped her elbows on the table and looked at me with mock admiration. “You know the most fascinating things.”

  “Oh, I used to have a piece of information even more useless than that. If I can remember it I’ll tell you.”

  We regained most of the mood, and had a fine dinner. She told me some more about herself. Her father had been a flight captain back in the old days of the flying boats and then later in the D.C.-4’s. She’d gone to Miami for a year before starting nurses’ training. She’d been engaged once, to a boy who’d gone off to Korea, and after waiting two years learned she didn’t really want to marry him after he returned. She liked medical lab work better than nursing, but she didn’t think she would have wanted to be a doctor even if she’d had the opportunity. Would she be glad to get back to Miami when we were able to get the motel back on its feet and sell it? She said yes, but that brought us back too near the ugliness again, and we shied off.

  I paid the bill and we went out and walked back to the car past the eyes that were like nailheads in the wall of silence around us. Only this time the silence was broken. There were two of them leaning against the corner where we turned. We were just past when one said, loudly enough to be sure he was heard, “Well, I reckon all it takes is guts.”

  In the quick, bright flare of anger, I turned and looked at them, but then, even before she had time to pluck at my sleeve, I remembered where the obligation lay. We went on, and when we were a dozen yards away she whispered, “Thanks, Bill.”

  “I told you before,” I said, “I wish I had your poise. When I get full, I blow up.”

  I looked back as I was opening the car door for her, and saw an odd thing. The big cop, Calhoun, was on the corner in front of the two men. It was too far to hear, but he appeared to be barking at them like a drill sergeant, and then he caught one by the shirt and snatched him off the wall as if he were a poster that had been imperfectly glued. When he let go and jerked a thumb, the two of them went across the street and disappeared.

  I called her attention to it. She nodded. “I know. He’s done that several times.”

  I remembered the first afternoon, when I’d collided with Frankie. “But still—”

  “Yes. He always looks at me as if I didn’t really exist. But he won’t tolerate anything like that. He’s a strange man, Bill. I’ve never understood him.”

  I turned right into Springer and we started back to the motel. We were just pulling away from the next traffic light when I heard her gasp. “Bill, that man!” I glanced quickly across the street in the direction she was pointing. There were several men. “The one in the white shirt! With the sleeves rolled up!”

  I saw him then, but I was already at the cross-roads and had to keep on straight ahead. He was walking in the opposite direction, back the way we’d come. I turned left at the next corner, made a figure-eight around the block, and came back. We went all the way down Springer to the river, but he was nowhere in sight. I tried a couple of the intersecting streets, with no luck.

  “Are you sure he was the one?” I asked. I’d had only a brief glimpse of him, but he did fit the description she’d given me that morning—tall, thin, sandy-haired, and sunburned.

  “I’m almost positive,” she said. Then she hesitated. “Of course, I just had a flash of him. And I didn’t see any glasses. Did you?”

  “No,” I said. “But they could have been props the other time.”

  We drove around for another ten minutes, and then parked for a time on Springer, watching the side-walks, but it was no use. “I’m going to drive you home,” I said, “and come back. He may be still in town, in a beer joint somewhere.”

  “You won’t do anything?” she asked anxiously.

  “No,” I told her. “We can’t even have him picked up unless you can give a positive identification. If he’s the wrong man, he’ll sue you for false arrest. If I can locate him and pin him down somewhere I’ll call you so you can have another look.”

  I drove back to the motel. She unlocked the front door of the office, and I called a cab. I gave her the car key, and we went into the living-room. One bridge lamp was burning dimly in a corner, striking faint light in her hair.

  She turned, and the gray eyes were concerned as they studied my face. “You will be careful, won’t you?”

  ??
?Sure,” I said.

  She smiled then, and held out her hands. “It’s been a wonderful evening, Bill.”

  I took the hint, and slid my hands up to take hold of her arms just above the elbows, and put my lips down against hers for a casual good-night kiss, but it got out of control. The next thing I was holding her far too fiercely and assaulting the sweetest and most exciting mouth in the world, and her arms were tight around my neck. Then she broke it up. She put her hands against my chest and pushed, but it was herself she was talking to. “As you were,” she said shakily, and stepped back, her face flushed and confused.

  “Cigarette,” she said. She took an unsteady breath.

  “It got away from me,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she said laconically.

  “How’s that?”

  “For not pointing out it was both of us it got away from. Or almost. It’s a little silly, isn’t it? I’ve known you for about three days.”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” I said. “My calendar and stop-watch are in my other suit. All I know is I think you’re wonderful.”

  She smiled. “It’s all right, Bill. I’ve never doubted you’re a normal, healthy, thirty-year-old male. You don’t have to prove it.”

  “I don’t think I was trying to.”

  “It was just a little frightening. I hadn’t realized before that after a long enough time a girl might give way just for a place to cry.”

  “Is that all?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Don’t ask me. But you’ll never believe how utterly damn sick you can get of being brave about something. Or how tempting that shoulder has looked a couple of times.”

  “It’s available,” I said.

  “Why?”

  I put my hands on either side of her face and tilted it up under mine. I just told you why. I think you’re magnificent. You’re a very fine, sweet, warm-hearted woman, and you’re full of tricks, like being a little more beautiful every time I see you.”

  I kissed her, very gently this time, and looked down at the fine dark tracery of lashes against her face. When she opened her eyes they were misty, but she smiled “All right, maybe I think you’re pretty nice, too,” she whispered. “And now, Bill, will you please get out of here?”