Talk of the town

  He gave me a hard grin. “You should have been a lawyer instead of a policeman.”

  “I should have been a landscape architect instead of either,” I replied. “But to get back to Mrs. Redfield. You’ve got some ground for suspicion or you wouldn’t have known what I was after.”

  “All right,” he agreed reluctantly. “It’s nothing but a string of coincidences. The first one, naturally, is the location of the two places. The woman—if it wasn’t Mrs. Langston—left Strader’s car there at the motel and walked home before daybreak. Redfield’s place is only a little over a quarter mile, cutting through that orchard. But if you’re going to suspect everybody that lives within walking distance of that motel, you suspect the whole town. This is not Los Angeles—”

  “All right,” I said. “What else?”

  He ground out his cigarette and sighed wearily. “Redfield was out of town both the other times Strader came up here.”

  I nodded. I suspected that, but there wasn’t any way I could even ask about it without being racked up. That clinches it.”

  He banged the table angrily with his fist. “That clinches what? You’d condemn a woman on the strength of a stupid coincidence like that? Listen, Chatham, that girl’s no floozie he picked up in a beer joint She’s a respectable married woman. She used to be a teacher—”

  “But that’s not quite all she used to be,” I said.

  “If you’re dragging up that old thing about her first husband,” he interrupted, “forget it. Everybody knows about it. It was an accident, pure and simple. The police and insurance company never questioned it at all.”

  “Sure,” I said. “That’s the deadly thing about a small policy. If it’d been a hundred thousand, they might have been a little more curious about what she did with the money.”

  “What did she do with it?”

  “She bought a bar for a man she met just three months before her husband electrocuted himself.”

  He stiffened. “What? Who was—?” Then he sighed.

  “Never mind. Are you sure it was Strader?”

  “It was Strader I was back-tracking when I found her,” I told him. “A girl he called Sin, with hair about the color of red wine. In New Orleans, the spring and summer of 1954. That would be between the time she left Warren Springs and showed up here.”

  He was staring at the cigarette in his hand and didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, as if he were very tired, “All right. How did you find out all this? Start with the day you got here.”

  I told him everything, pausing once while he went out in the kitchen for more beer. When I’d finished, he said, “You’ll never prove any of it.”

  “I know,” I said. “Not with what I’ve got now.”

  “You know what Redfield will do.”

  “She committed murder.”

  “You don’t know that; you’re just guessing there. And before you even take up that part, you got to tell him his wife is a tramp. You want to try that?”

  The telephone rang. It was on the end of the table. He reached over and picked it up. “Calhoun.”

  He listened for a moment. “Who? Rupe Hulbert? Okay, tell him to come to the phone.” There was a slight pause, and then, “Rupe, this is Calhoun. The bartender says you’re making a nuisance of yourself. Go on home. . . . Okay.” He hung up.

  I looked at him and shook my head. “You just tell him over the phone?”

  He made a deprecating gesture. “Oh, Rupe’s not a bad boy. It’s just that when he gets a few aboard he starts finding boxing gloves in his beer.”

  Rupe, I reflected, had probably been thrown through a wall.

  “You think Langston went over there that morning?” he asked. “And walked in on them?”

  “He must have.”

  “But why would he? Even if he’d forgotten Redfield had called off the fishing trip, he wouldn’t have tried to go in.”

  “Let’s try it this way,” I said. “He knew Redfield wasn’t there. And he didn’t know Strader was. Remember, it was Mrs. Langston who registered him that time.”

  He whistled softly. “Son, when you’re convinced of something, you don’t care whose feet you step on, do you? Langston was a highly respected man around here. He wasn’t a chaser. Redfield was a friend of his. He had no reason to believe that if he went in there Mrs. Redfield would do anything but scream her head off.”

  “I said I was trying it,” I told him. “But. dammit, Calhoun, he went in there, and it got him killed. It has to be that way. He could have known what she was. He might have seen her with Strader one of the other times.”

  He shook his head. “But even if he did catch them, I’m still not convinced they’d kill him.”

  “Well, the obvious possibility, of course, is that it was a mistake. They thought he was Redfield, and panicked. They both drive station wagons. But I’m not sure that’s it. I think there must be more to it.”

  “Okay. But here’s where you fall apart. There’s a hole in your case a mile wide, and it’s the same old thing they’ve had from the start. The reason it had to be Mrs. Langston. And still does. And that’s the fact that one of them knew if there was a homicide investigation he’d be suspected. And there’s never been the slightest reason to suspect Mrs. Redfield. She and Strader could have dumped Langston’s body in a ditch anywhere and there’d never be any reason to question either of them.”

  “Check,” I said. “It took me a long time to see the answer to that; I just got it a little while ago. Mrs. Redfield is your cookie, all right, and the reason she’s never shown up is she only thought she’d be suspected. It was a perfectly natural mistake.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t get you.”

  “Put yourself in Mrs. Redfield’s place a minute. You’re looking down at the body of a man you’ve just murdered, and you realize that no matter when they find this body, or where, people are going to know that the last place it can be proved definitely he ever started for alive was your house, two minutes ago—”

  “But he wasn’t supposed to go there-” He stopped and stared at me. “Well, I’ll be damned!”

  “Sure,” I said. “She simply doesn’t know that. All she does know is that Langston is in his fishing clothes, and he’s apparently come by for Redfield, the same way he’s done a dozen times before. Maybe she didn’t even know there’d been a trip planned. Maybe she knew it, and jumped to the conclusion Redfield had forgotten to notify Langston it was off. Either way, Redfield and Mrs. Langston both were going to know Langston had come there.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said again.

  “The only drawback to it,” I went on, “is the fact that if it did happen exactly that way, nobody’ll ever be able to prove a word of it. There’s not a shred of evidence: two of the people involved are dead, and all the third one has to do is sit tight. She’s got it made, from every direction.”

  14

  He nodded. “It’s a dead end.”

  “Check,” I said. “But there’s a chance it wasn’t quite as simple as that Langston may have stumbled onto something more serious than a cheating wife that morning. And on more than two people.”

  “The man with the shotgun.”

  “That’s right. And remember, the woman who called me on the phone to send me out to that barn definitely wasn’t Mrs. Redfield.”

  “So that blows your boy-friend theory all to hell. Women cheating on their husbands don’t sell tickets, or invite the neighbors.”

  “It would seem to,” I said. “But I’m not so sure. Let me ask a question. Was there any other crime committed around here that night? Robbery, stick-up, anything?”

  He thought about it. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Remember, when this murder broke it would get shuffled into the background.”

  “I’d have to dig back into the records. It’d have probably gone to the Sheriff’s office, anyway. But why?”

  “Well, several things,” I said. “When you jumped Strader, he pu
lled a gun. Hasn’t anybody ever wondered why he was carrying one?”

  “Well, he’d just committed a murder. Carrying a gun doesn’t stack up to much, compared to that”

  “But that’s not the point. Why was he carrying one? Langston wasn’t killed with a gun, so it didn’t have anything to do with that. And Langston’s death was incidental, anyway. Strader came up here for something else. And real-estate salesmen don’t usually go around muscled up that way.”

  “But he didn’t have a record.”

  “No. But you got to start somewhere. Did they ever trace the gun?”

  “It was stolen from a Tampa sporting goods store a year or so ago. Could have been through a dozen hands before Strader got hold of it.”

  “It doesn’t fit in,” I said. “He didn’t need a gun.”

  “Wait a minute!” he said suddenly. “You asked me a minute ago if something else happened that night—” Then he subsided. “Oh, hell, that was in Georgia.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “It was a gang that almost wrecked a town, just to steal a couple of lousy safes. Killed a man, completely destroyed a power substation, and burned up one of those big gasoline tankers, at least a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of damage, and they probably got ten thousand for it.”

  “Was it the same night?”

  “I’m pretty sure. But hell, this was up in Georgia. Weaverton. Nearly a hundred miles—”

  “They never caught any of ‘em?” I asked.

  “Hm. Not as far as I know. But we’d have nothing to i do with it.”

  I was beginning to feel excited. “Two safes? Whose were they?”

  I think one was a supermarket and the other a jewelry store.”

  “Well, listen,” I said quickly. The telephone rang and I broke off as he reached for it.

  “Calhoun,” he said. “Yes. . . . Prowler? . . . Where’s that again? . . . Okay.”

  He hung up and sprang to his feet. “I’ve got to run out in the east end, but I’ll drop you off in town. Did you have a car?”

  “No,” I said, hurrying out after him. “I’ll get a cab.”

  “I want to talk to you some more,” he said, as we shot back towards Springer. “Make it around noon. I’ll be up by then.”

  ”Sure,” I said. “And will you dig up any dope you can find on that Weaverton thing?”

  “Anything in particular?”

  “Yeah. If it was the same night, and they still haven’t made anybody for it, see if you can find out what kind of burglar alarms those places had.”

  He slid to a stop at the corner. “Burglar alarms?” But I was already out, and he shot across on the light without waiting for a reply.

  I buttoned my jacket to hide as much of the wrecked shirt as possible, and hurried across the street to the cab stand, followed by silence and blank stares. I was Chatham, the trouble-maker, the goon who bore the marks of his trade, the split-open head, torn clothing, and the battered hands. When I climbed in the cab and told the driver where to go, he said curtly, without looking around, “I know where you live.”

  I let it ride. If I didn’t get into another stupid and unnecessary fight for a week I’d still be ahead of quota.

  When we pulled in at the motel, I looked around in surprise. The station wagon was gone and the front door of the office was ajar. Had she become worried and gone to look for me? I glanced at my watch; it was only twenty past ten. She wouldn’t have left the door open, anyway. I paid off the driver and hurried inside. The lobby was dark, but cracks of light showed through the curtains in the doorway. I pushed through them, and stopped abruptly. The coffee table was overturned, the glass top broken, and cigarette butts were scattered on the rug from a shattered ashtray. A broken cup lay near it, in a wet coffee stain. I ran to the bedroom and peeked I into the bath. Everything was in order in both of them, and in the kitchen. I plunged back through the living-room and snapped on the light in the lobby. There were no evidences of struggle here, no blood anywhere. But she wouldn’t have left the door open.

  I swore at myself for wasting time and grabbed the telephone. I couldn’t call Calhoun; he was out, and this was beyond the city limits, anyway. Redfield was my only hope, and he was off. I looked up his home number. In my hurry, I botched it the first time, and had to dial it over. Cynthia Redfield answered.

  “This is Chatham, at the Magnolia Lodge,” I said quickly. “Is your husband there?”

  “Why, no,” she said. She sounded surprised. “I thought he might be over there, Mr. Chatham. I’ve been trying to call you for nearly ten minutes—”

  “Over here?” I broke in.

  “Yes. He went to a lodge meeting, and there’s a man here at the house who wants to see him about something urgent, so I phoned the hall. But they said he’d got a call and left.”

  “Did they say he was coming here?”

  “I thought so. Anyway, it’s something about the Magnolia Lodge the man wants to tell him. About Mrs. Langston.”

  “Is he still there?” I interrupted. “Yes. Has something—?”

  “Don’t let him leave,” I said. I snapped down the switch, and jiggled it furiously until I heard the dial tone. I called a cab.

  When we pulled to a stop before the house the porch light was on, but there was no car parked in the street. Maybe the man had gone. I could see the back of Redfield’s station wagon in the drive, however, so presumably he had got home. I tossed the driver a dollar and hurried up the walk.

  Cynthia Redfield came to the door. “Oh, come in, Mr. Chatham.”

  “Has he gone?” I asked quickly.

  She nodded. “But just downtown to look for Kelly. If he doesn’t find him, he’s coming back. Come on into the living-room and I’ll try the lodge hall again.”

  I followed her down the short corridor. It turned to the right at the rear, apparently to the dining-room and kitchen. About half-way back a door on the left led into the living-room. We went in. There was a fireplace at the far end and another corridor going towards the bedrooms in that wing of the house. The large picture window looking out over the alcove and rear yard was on the right, but the curtains were tightly closed. There was another curtained window in front, with a sofa, coffee table, and two modern Swedish chairs grouped in front of it. Over to my left was a record player and beside it a low table covered with L.P. records in their colorful jackets. The room was air-conditioned.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  She turned, and smiled with a despairing shake of her head that set the pony tail a-swing. “He’s a Cuban, and very hard to understand, especially when he’s excited. But I think it’s something about Mrs. Langston. Has something happened?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “It’s probably nothing serious,” she said soothingly. “But we’re wasting time. Let me try that lodge hall again.”

  The telephone was on a small stand between the sofa and record player. She dialed, and said. “This is Mrs. Redfield again. Will you check and see if my husband’s come back? Thank you.” She waited.

  “The Cuban,” I urged. “Is he local? What’s his name, and where can I—?”

  She put a hand over the transmitter. “His name is Montoya,” she said. “He lives on a farm just outside town. He always goes to Kelly with everything, because Kelly can speak Spanish to him.” She nodded towards a chair. “Please sit down, Mr. Chatham.”

  I thanked her, but remained standing. Even in the midst of the worry sawing at my nerves, I was conscious of thinking she was incredible. I was positive she’d killed a man, and maybe she’d killed two, but you couldn’t really believe it. I looked at the modest cotton dress, the flat slippers, the pony tail caught in its round comb at the back of her head, and the quiet, tanned face. When private eyes ran into them they were slinky, and long in the thigh, and their round-the-clock costume was just enough filmy nylon to raise a question as to whether their nipples were coral or mauve, and they carried .45’s—God knows where—but this was the gener
ic young suburban housewife, the psychology major four years later with two children and every other week on the kindergarten car pool. Maybe I was crazy.

  It was very quiet in the room except for the faint and rhythmic tapping of her nails against the top of the telephone stand as she waited. I had wandered over by the phonograph, and suddenly something caught my eye among the flamboyant jackets of the L.P. records piled on the little table. It was some Flamenco guitar, and the cover was taken up with the picture of the artist, and his name, of course, in large letters. It was Carlos Montoya.

  Montoya!

  I was suddenly tense and uneasy. No, I thought; I called her. But, still—

  “All right, thank you,” she said into the phone, and hung up. “He’s not there,” she said, frowning a little. “I think I’ll try Farrar’s Café. He goes there a lot—”

  She’d just started to turn back to the phone when she wrinkled up her nose and glanced at the coffee table with an exasperated smile. “But let me get that horrible cigarette out of here before it smells up my curtains. Talk about ground-up cigar butts.”

  She picked up the ashtray and went past me. There were two cigarette stubs in it, and one of them was an oval type with very black tobacco. My nerves relaxed.

  When she returned, I asked, “Could you make any sense at all out of what Montoya wanted?”

  She hesitated. “Well, it probably sounds much worse than it actually is, the way he garbles things. But I gathered he drove in there to see her about buying her husband’s old outboard motor, and she was getting in her car with two men. They were holding her up as if she were drunk, and she didn’t speak to him. But let me try the café, and if Kelly isn’t there we’ll call the Highway Patrol.”

  She turned back to the phone and dialed. I waited, jumpy with impatience. She swung around facing me, the base of the instrument dangling from her right hand as she waited for someone to answer.,

  Then she cried out, “Kelly . . . Kelly!” in a strangled voice, and casually tossed the instrument, receiver and all, onto the floor.