“It’s about the only thing that fits the facts we have now,” she said.
I fit a cigarette, and one for her. “There’s one more thing that puzzles me at the moment,” I said. “How did you ever work for me for a full year without my finding out you had more sense than I have?”
She gave me that cynical, lopsided grin. “Hiding that from the boss is the first thing any secretary learns.” She went on, “Seriously, though—”
“Seriously, though,” I interrupted her, “I’m beginning to think the only smart thing I’ve done in years was hire you, when you left George. Incidentally, why did you quit him? I don’t think you ever told me.”
She shrugged. “I just didn’t like legal work, I guess. It’s too fussy—ten copies of everything, and no erasures. But let’s get back to the brainstorming. The next question telegraphs itself.”
“Right,” I said. “What was the boy friend so afraid of, that he’d pay off to Roberts? Scandal? Divorce?”
She shook her head. “It must have been more than that. He not only paid off, he finally killed him. And her, too.”
I nodded. “I still think Doris Bentley knows more about it than she’ll admit. Do you suppose it could have had something to do with Junior Delevan? She was still working for Frances then.”
She nibbled at her lower lip. “Yes, I think she was. I’ve been trying to remember exactly when it happened. In May, wasn’t it, two years ago? It was Sunday morning when they found his body, and the medical examiner estimated he’d been killed around midnight the night before.”
“Sure, I remember now. I was in Tampa on business and didn’t hear about it until I got back, the following Tuesday, I think—” I paused, trying to recall something. “Wait a minute! I’ve got it now. I had a date with Frances that Saturday night, to take her to a country club dance at Rutherford, but had to break it at the last minute and drive to Mobile to catch a plane. And now that I think about it, she was acting a little strangely when I came back, as if something were bothering her. I just thought it was because of the broken date.”
“Well, she couldn’t have killed Junior—not without an elephant gun. Or carried his body out there to the dump. He was a pretty big boy—around 200 pounds.”
A wild idea was beginning to nudge the edge of my mind. It was a forlorn hope, but all I had now. “I’ve got to talk to Doris. If she knows anything, I’ll scare it out of her.”
She stared at me. “You can’t leave here.”
“I can’t stay here forever, either. None of this has got me anywhere; I started out trying to find out who’d killed Frances, and now I don’t even know who she was. I’m just going backward.”
“Somebody’ll see you. Or she’ll call the police.”
“I’ll have to risk it. Do you know where she lives?”
She still looked scared. “No. But if you insist, I can find out. And I’ll drive you.”
“No. Absolutely not.”
She stood up. “I’ve got to get back out front I’ll talk to you later.”
She called Scanlon and read him the telegram from Crosby.
“What do you think now?” she asked.
“That I must be crazy myself: I asked for this job.”
“Don’t you consider that this information changes the picture a little?”
“Nothing can change the facts, Mrs. Ryan. Warren killed her, no matter who she was.”
“I thought you weren’t trying the case, Mr. Scanlon.”
He sighed. “I’m not. But Warren was there in the house alone when she drove the car into the garage, and when he left the house she was dead. There’s no way anybody can climb out of that. It’s sealed, it’s final. But never mind that. Just remember, when he calls, all you have to do is keep him talking as long as possible. The telephone company and the El Paso Police will do the rest And he should call any time now.”
“All right,” she said, her tone edged with bitterness. “But if it develops there’s a reward for the job, don’t forget to send it to me in silver.”
“Stop beating yourself over the head. Do you want him to kill somebody else before we can catch him?”
She went out after awhile for coffee, and when she came back there was somebody with her. I could hear a man’s voice I thought was Turner’s; apparently he’d decided to come in for something. The typewriter clattered. At five-thirty I heard them preparing to leave. Her heels clicked down the passage as she went to the washroom, and a folded sheet of paper slid under the door. I picked up the typed message.
“Doris Bentley lives in that apartment house at the corner of Taylor and Westbury. Apartment 2C. This is Saturday, so she’ll probably have a date after she gets off work. I’ll find out and let you know. Since you can’t answer the phone unless you’re sure it’s me, let it ring at least ten times.
“Questions, pertinent and impertinent: If F. were hiding from something or somebody, why did she choose Carthage? Just at random? Was that apartment at the rear of the store furnished as living quarters at the time she rented it? And was that space the best available in town at the time for a dress shop? Assuming Doris is right about the boy friend, how did the two of them get by with it in a town this size without anybody but Doris ever suspecting?”
Smart girl, I thought; you’re priceless. I lit a cigarette and sat frowning at the sheet of paper. The implication was clear, and along the same line as the thought I’d already had—that it was improbable that two people would come to a town where they knew no one at all and open businesses. My idea, of course, had been that she and Roberts had known each other somewhere before; on the information I had now, that seemed very unlikely. And after all, she’d come here over a year before Roberts had. So maybe she knew somebody else, who was already here. Who’d brought her here. And was it because of the apartment? Or rather, its location? I tried to remember the places available at the time. There’d been a vacant store in this block, I was pretty sure, which would have been a better location for that type shop. Of course, I’d given her a good sales talk, but she hadn’t been hard to convince.
It wasn’t much of an apartment, just a small pullman kitchen, bathroom, and combined living room and bedroom, but it was already completely furnished. There were two entrances, one through the front of the store, and the other on the alley—or rather, into the vestibule at the foot of the rear stairs coming down from the second floor.
I began to feel the proddings of excitement. Naturally, a man going in and out the front door of a main street dress shop, open or closed, day or night, would be as conspicuous as a broken leg in a chorus line, and the rear entrance wasn’t a great deal better. But suppose he was already in the building, a tenant of one of the offices on the second floor? Then the excitement drained away as I named them over in my mind: Dr. Martin; George Clement; Dr. Atlee; Dr. Sawyer, the dentist. Sawyer and Martin were both at least 65, Dr. Atlee was a woman, and George—it was ridiculous.
But the idea refused to die altogether. George and Dr. Martin were both members of the Duck Club. And pillars of the community had been caught off base before, plenty of times. Then I grunted, and ground out the cigarette. The whole thing was pure speculation, and where was there any motive for murder, anyway? The man I was looking for had killed two people; he’d been afraid of something worse than a divorce and a little scandal.
The room began to grow dark, but I didn’t dare turn on a light. I wondered if I could stand another six or seven hours alone with my thoughts without going mad. I wished Barbara would call. At last I could stand it no longer, and called her, holding the cigarette lighter so I could see to dial. Her line was busy. I waited five minutes and was about to try again when the phone began to ring. I let it ring ten times and picked it up.
“Hello,” she said softly. “I’ve just been talking to Paul Denman in New Orleans.”
“Did you learn anything?”
“Very little, and nothing that’s any help. He doesn’t remember much about this Randall’s voice
except that it was in the low baritone range and the man sounded as if he were reasonably well educated. Could be any one of a dozen men here in town—including you. He says it might be possible he’d recognize the voice if he heard it again, but he’d never be able to pick it out of a number of others in the same register, and as far as evidence is concerned it would be useless in court. The money Randall sent him was in a plain white envelope you can buy in any dime store. Typewriter addressed. No message with it.”
“Looks like a dead end there,” I said. “But thanks a million for trying.”
“I’m going out now to see what Doris Bentley does when she gets off work, and I’ll call you later.”
I waited. I began thinking about Frances, and seeing the ruin of her face before me in the dark, and knew I had to stop it or I’d go crazy. I tried to force my thoughts back into some logical approach to the solution of the thing, but my mind was numb. I’d been struggling with it too long. Then I found myself thinking of Barbara, and of the old cliché that you never know who your friends are until you’re in trouble.
She was originally from Rutherford, and had had the misfortune to fall in love with and marry a kid whose life was all behind him by the time he could vote. Johnnie Ryan at 18 was like Alexander at 32 or whatever it was. Rutherford is a town that’s as football-crazy as Texas, to begin with, and Ryan was the greatest halfback the high school had ever produced. Most kids take it in stride, but apparently those autumn afternoons of jampacked stands all screaming, “Oh, Johnnie, oh, Johnnie, how you can run!”—with probably too many of the girls having good reason to remember the original words of the song—had done something to him from which he could never recover. He’d gone off to Ole Miss on an athletic scholarship, but he was up against tougher competition there and never quite made it back to the pinnacle. He tried out with the Chicago Bears the autumn he and Barbara were married, but discovered that high school clippings didn’t buy you anything in a pro outfit where they played football for keeps, and he’d come home after a month.
She’d never talked about it, but I guess it was pretty rough being married to an ex-hero. He’d done all right for a while, selling cars in Rutherford, and then in New Orleans, and Mobile, and Oxford, Mississippi, and finally here in Carthage, working for Jim MacBride, but the commissions were growing smaller as the drunks got bigger and longer and the extra-marital affairs more numerous. Maybe it was simply a matter of needing new and adoring faces and the haze of alcohol to bring back the old feeling of greatness, because there was nothing mean or vicious about him and he was generally well-liked. But in the end there were just too many girls, apparently. When he’d moved on—to Florida, I think— Barbara had stayed. Six years of it was enough. She already had a job as a stenographer at the Southland Tide Company and a Notary’s commission. George handled the divorce for her, and had offered her a job in his office at more money, so she’d gone to work for him in the fall of 1958. But after less than a year she’d resigned and had come to work for me. That was a year ago last September.
The hours dragged by. It was eleven-thirty. Midnight. I began to tense up. It was going to be dangerous, but anything was better than staying here. The phone rang shortly after one A.M.
“Doris has a date, all right. With Mulholland.”
I came instantly alert. “What do you suppose that means?”
“Could be anything. Or nothing except that he’s 25 and single, she’s pretty, and it’s Saturday night. It’s pretty hard to stamp out that sort of thing.”
“Well, you’re having a fine Saturday night,” I said regretfully. “Did you break a date to do all this?”
“No, I didn’t have one. I seem to be at an awkward age; too old for football rallies and too young for bingo. They’re out at the Neon Castle, dancing.”
The Neon Castle—the real name of it was Castleman’s Inn—was a roadside restaurant and night club about ten miles east of town. “I followed them out there,” she said, “to be sure that was where they were headed. Even if they only stay a couple of hours, they’ll have to park somewhere afterward for the Machine Age fertility ritual, so it’ll probably be three or later before she gets home. In the meantime I’ve been busy with my do-it-yourself detective kit, and I’ve got a couple of ideas I want to talk over with you. I’ll pick you up in my car—”
“No,” I said. “I won’t let you take the chance—”
She cut me off. “Don’t argue, Duke. You’d never get to her apartment afoot; there are still a few people on the streets. In five minutes I’ll be parked at the mouth of the alley. When you come out. the back door, stay against the wall and watch me. If the street’s clear, I’ll signal. Get in back and crouch down.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but she’d hung up.
I checked my watch with the aid of the cigarette lighter, groped around for the topcoat, and put it on. When five minutes had passed, I slipped out into the passage, and pushed open the back door. The alley was in deep shadow, and silent except for the humming of Fuller’s exhaust fan. Her Ford pulled up and stopped at the curb just beyond the mouth of it, and I could see her rather dimly in the light from the street lamp at the intersection of Clebourne. She motioned, and opened the rear door. I crossed the sidewalk on the run, dived in, and knelt on the floor between the seats.
“All clear,” she whispered. “There was nobody in sight.” The car was in motion then, and turned right, east along Clebourne. I kept my head down, but could see the blinking amber light as we passed the first street intersection. She turned left at the next one. We were going north on Montrose. I heard a car pass, going the other way. In a few minutes we turned left again, and appeared to be climbing, and I heard gravel under the tires. We made another sharp left turn, went on a few yards very slowly, and stopped. She cut the engine and I heard the click as she switched off the headlights. “Okay, Duke,” she said softly.
I sat up. The car was parked on the brow of the hill just back of the city limits on the north side of town. Behind us and on the left were dark lines of trees, but it was open in front, where the hill started to drop away, and I could see the lighted artery of Clebourne stretching away below us from right to left, from one end of town to the other. We were completely alone up here. The wind had stopped, but there was the sharp bite of frost in the air, and when I opened the door and got out the sky was aflame with the cold glitter of stars. I stood for a moment beside the car, looking out over the town where I was born and where I’d lived most of my life, but all I could think of was the back room of the Carthage Funeral Home where the two of them lay with their shattered and unrecognizable faces on individual white enamel tabletops, and the fact that somewhere in that cluster of lights was the man who had killed them. Asleep, maybe? Or could he sleep? And what was it like just at the moment of waking? I tried to shake off these morbid reflections and get back to a more practical view of the matter; there was more than that down there. There were men who were going to arrest me for murder if they could get their hands on me. I opened the front door and slid in on the seat beside Barbara. She moved over some parcels to make room for me.
“Here,” she said, picking up one of the things lying on the seat. It was a pint bottle of whiskey.
“You’re an angel,” I said.
“No, a St. Bernard, but I get tired of that little cask around my neck. When you’ve had a drink of that, there’s some food.”
I took a big drink—straight out of the bottle when she said she didn’t want any—felt it unfold inside me, and opened the cardboard box. It contained a steak sandwich, wrapped in three or four big paper napkins and still warm. I tore into it, suddenly realizing I hadn’t had anything to eat except a couple of those plywood sandwiches in over 48 hours. When I’d finished it, she uncapped a pint thermos bottle of coffee and poured me a cup.
“Where are the dancing girls, and my Turkish water pipe?” I asked. She grinned, the slender face just visible in the starlight, and dug cigarettes out of her purse. I held t
he lighter for her, and then lit my own. She was wearing a rough tweed skirt and a sweater, and a cloth coat with the collar turned up under the cascade of reddish brown hair.
“Now,” she said, “as they say on Madison Avenue, let’s kick this thing around and see what we stub our toe on.”
“Right. But first let me say that if I ever get out of this mess, the first thing I’m going to do is petition the court to have you adopt me.” I repeated the whole story of night before last, beginning with the anonymous telephone call.
When I’d finished, she nodded, and said, “Maybe you could use a guardian, with that hot-headed approach to everything. But let’s break it down. First, Mulholland could have known she was home. If he saw the gloves, he should have realized that was her suitcase. And he left the courthouse while you were still there?”
“Yes. Probably an hour before George and I left.”
“But on the other hand, it’s almost certain she called somebody the minute you left the house. That’s why the line was busy when I tried to call you, because I’m positive it was after eleven-forty-five. So it could have been anybody. Now, remember carefully—how long do you think it was from the time you called George Clement until he arrived in the Sheriff’s office?”
“Not over ten minutes,” I said, and then did a delayed take. “George?”
“Why not?” she asked. “That’s the way the police operate, from all the mysteries I’ve read. Anybody’s under suspicion until he’s been cleared by the facts. Also, there’s something else I’ll get to shortly—a couple of things—but first let’s look at that ten minutes. How many blocks would he have to drive to go from his to your house and then to the courthouse?”
I ran it in my mind, beginning at his house in the east end of town. Three west on Clebourne, five south on Montrose, five back, three more west on Clebourne, and two north on Stanley. “Eighteen. It’s impossible. Also, he had to dress.”
“He said he had to dress. But suppose he was already dressed and on his way out, because of another telephone call he’d received a few minutes before?”