Archer - The Chill Part 27

I could hear a quick interchange of voices in Bradshaw's room. The woman's voice seemed to want something, which Bradshaw's voice denied. I thought I recognized the woman's voice, but I couldn't be sure.

I was sure when Bradshaw finally opened the door. He tried to slip out without letting me see in, but I caught a glimpse of Laura Sutherland. She was sitting upright on the edge of the unmade bed in a severely cut Paisley robe. Her hair was down around her shoulders, and she was rosy and beautiful.

Bradshaw jerked the door shut. "So now you know."

He had pulled on slacks and a black turtleneck sweater which made him look more undergraduate than ever. In spite of the tension in him, he seemed quite happy.

"I don't know what I know," I said.

"This is not an illicit liaison, believe me. Laura and I were married some time ago. We're keeping our marriage secret, for the present. I'm going to ask you to go along with that."

I didn't say whether I would or not. "Why all the secrecy?"

"We have our reasons. For one thing, under the college regulations, Laura would have to give up her post. She intends to, of course, but not immediately. And then there's Mother. I don't know how I'm going to break it to Jaer."

"You could just tell her. She'll survive."

"It's easy enough to say. It isn't possible."

The thing that made it impossible, I thought, was Mother's money. Having money and looking forward to inheriting more were difficult habits for a man to break in early middle age. But I felt a sneaking admiration for Bradshaw. He had more life in him than I'd suspected.

We went downstairs and through the lobby, where Arnie was playing gin rummy with the night clerk. The bar was a gloomy cavern with antlers on the walls instead of stalact.i.tes and customers instead of stalagmites. One of the customers, a local man wearing a cap and windbreaker and carrying a load, wanted to buy Bradshaw and me a drink. The bartender told him it was time to go home. Surprisingly, he went, and most of the others drifted out after him.

We sat at the bar. Bradshaw ordered a double bourbon and insisted on one for me, though I didn't need it. There was some aggression in his insistence. He hadn't forgiven me for stumbling on his secret, or for dragging him away from his wife's bed.

"Well," he said, "what about Judson Foley?"

"He tells me you recognized him Friday night."

"I had an intuition that it was he." Bradshaw had recovered his accent, and was using it as a kind of vocal mask.

"Why didn't you say so? You could have saved a lot of legwork and expense."

He looked at me solemnly over his drink. "I had to be certain and I was very far from being that. I couldn't accuse a man, and set the police on his trail, unless I were certain."

"So you came here to make certain?"

"It happened to work out that way. There are times in a man's life when everything seems to fall together into place, have you noticed?" A momentary flash of glee broke through his earnestness. "Laura and I had been planning to steal a weekend here for some time, and the conference gave us the opportunity. Foley was a side issue, but of course a very important one. I looked him up this morning and questioned him thoroughly. He seems completely innocent to me."

"Innocent of what?"

"Of Helen's murder. Foley went to her house to give her what protection he could, but she was already beyond protection when he got there. He lost his nerve and ran."

"What was he afraid of?"

"A false accusation, what he calls a frameup. He's had some trouble with the law in the past. It had to do with shaving points, as they call it, in football games."

"How do you know?"

"He told me. I have," he said with a chuckle of vanity, "a certain capacity to inspire confidence in these--ah--disaffiliates. The man was utterly forthright with me, and in my considered opinion he had nothing to do with Helen's murder."

"You're probably right. I'd still like to find out more about him."

"I know very little about him. He was a friend of Helen's. I saw him once or twice in her company."

"In Reno."

"Yes. I spent a part of the summer in Nevada. It's another fact about myself that I'm not publicizing." He added rather vaguely: "A man has a right to some private life, surely."

"You mean you were here with Laura?"

He dropped his eyes. "She was with me a part of the time. We hadn't quite made up our minds to get married. It was quite a decision. It meant the end of her career and the end of my--life with Mother," he concluded lamely.

"I can understand your reason for keeping it quiet. Still I wish you'd told me that you met Foley and Helen last month in Reno."

"I should have. I apologize. One acquires the habit of secrecy." He added in a different, pa.s.sionate voice: "I'm deeply in love with Laura. I'm jealous of anything that threatens to disturb our idyl." His words were formal and old-fas.h.i.+oned, but the feeling behind them seemed real.

"What was the relations.h.i.+p between Foley and Helen?"

"They were friends, nothing more, I'd say. Frankly I was a little surprised at her choice of companion. But he was younger than she, and I suppose that was the attraction. Presentable escorts are at a premium in Reno, you know. I had quite a time myself fending off the onslaughts of various predatory females."

"Does that include Helen?"

"I suppose it does." Through the gloom I thought I could discern a faint blush on his cheek. "Of course she didn't know about my--my _thing_ with Laura. I've kept it a secret from everyone."

"Is that why you don't want Foley taken back for questioning?"

"I didn't say that."

"I'm asking you."

"I suppose that's partly it." There was a long silence. "But if you think it's necessary, I won't argue. Laura and I have nothing really to hide."

The bartender said: "Drink up, gentlemen. It's closing time."

We drank up. In the lobby Bradshaw gave me a quick nervous handshake, muttering something about getting back to his wife. He went up the stairs two at a time, on his toes.

I waited for Arnie to finish his game of gin. One of the things that made him a first-rate detective was his ability to merge with almost any group, nest into almost any situation, and start a conversation rolling. He and the night man shook hands when we left the hotel.

"The woman your friend registered with," he said in the car, "is a good-looking brownette type, well stacked, who talks like a book."

"She's his wife."

"You didn't tell me Bradshaw was married," he said rather irritably.

"I just found out. The marriage is _sub rosa_. The poor beggar has a dominating mother in the background. In the foreground. The old lady has money, and I think he's afraid of being disinherited."

"He better come clean with her, and take his chances."

"That's what I told him."

Arnie put the car in gear and as we drove west and south along the lakesh.o.r.e, recounted a long story about a client he had handled for Pinkerton in San Francis...o...b..fore the war. She was a well-heeled widow of sixty or so who lived in Hillsborough with her son, a man in his thirties. The son was always home by midnight, but seldom before, and the mother wanted to know what he was doing with his evenings. It turned out he had been married for five years to an ex-waitress whom he maintained, with their three small children, in a row house in South San Francisco.

Arnie seemed to think that this was the end of the story.

"What happened to the people?" I asked him.

"The old lady fell in love with her grandchildren and put up with the daughter-in-law for their sake. They all lived happily ever after, on her money."

"Too bad Bradshaw hasn't been married long enough to have any children."

We drove in silence for a while. The road left the sh.o.r.e and tunneled among trees which enclosed it like sweet green coagulated night. I kept thinking about Bradshaw and his unsuspected masculinity.

"I'd like you to do some checking on Bradshaw, Arnie."

"Has this marriage business escalated him into a suspect?"

"Not in my book. Not yet, anyway. But he did suppress the fact that he met Helen Haggerty in Reno last summer. I want to know exactly what he was doing here in the month of August. He told Judson Foley he was doing research at the University of Nevada, but that doesn't seem likely."

"Why not?"

"He's got a doctorate from Harvard, and he'd normally do his research there or at Berkeley or Stanford. I want you to do some checking on Foley, too. Find out if you can why Foley was fired by the Solitaire Club."

"That shouldn't be too hard. Their top security man is an old friend of mine." He looked at his watch in the light from the dash. "We could go by there now but he probably won't be on duty this late on a Sunday night."

"Tomorrow will do."

Phyllis was waiting for us with food and drink. We sat up in her kitchen foolishly late, getting mildly drunk on beer and shared memories and exhaustion. Eventually the conversation came full circle, back to Helen Haggerty and her death. At three o'clock in the morning I was reading aloud her translated poem in the _Bridgeton Blazer_ about the violins of the autumn winds.

"It's terribly sad," Phyllis said. "She must have been a remarkable young girl, even if it is only a translation."

"That was her father's word for her. Remarkable. He's remarkable, too, in his own way."

I tried to tell them about the tough old drunken heartbroken cop who had sired Helen. Suddenly it was half-past three and Phyllis was asleep with her head resting like a tousled dahlia among the bottles on the kitchen table. Arnie began gathering up the bottles, carefully, so as not to wake her unnecessarily soon.

Alone in their guest room I had one of those intuitions that come sometimes when you're very tired and emotionally stirred up. I became convinced that Hoffman had given me the _Blazer_ for a reason. There was something in it he wanted me to see.

I sat in my underwear on the edge of the open fresh-smelling bed and read the little magazine until my eyes crossed. I learned a good deal about student activities at Bridgeton City College twenty-two years ago, but nothing of any apparent consequence to my case.

I found another poem I liked, though. It was signed with the initials G.R.B., and it went: If light were dark And dark were light, Moon a black hole In the blaze of night, A raven's wing As bright as tin, Then you, my love, Would be darker than sin.

I read it aloud at breakfast. Phyllis said she envied the woman it had been written to. Arnie complained that his scrambled eggs weren't moist. He was older than Phyllis, and it made him touchy.

We decided after breakfast to leave Judson Foley sitting for the present. If Dolly Kincaid were arrested and arraigned, Foley would make a fairly good surprise witness for the defense. Arnie drove me to the airport, where I caught a Pacific ffight to Los Angeles.

I picked up an L.A. paper at International Airport, and found a brief account of the Haggerty killing in the Southland News on an inside page. It informed me that the wife-slayer Thomas McGee, released from San Quentin earlier in the year, was being sought for questioning. Dolly Kincaid wasn't mentioned.

chapter 25.

Around noon I walked into Jerry Marks's store-front office. His secretary told me that Monday was the day for the weekly criminal docket and Jerry had spent the morning in court. He was probably having lunch somewhere near the courthouse. Yes, Mr. Kincaid had got in touch with Mr. Marks on Sunday, and retained him.

I found them together in the restaurant where Alex and I had lunched the day it began. Alex made room for me on his side of the booth, facing the front. Business was roaring, and there was a short lineup inside the front door.

"I'm glad the two of you got together," I said.

Alex produced one of his rare smiles. "So am I. Mr. Marks has been wonderful."

Jerry flapped his hand in a depreciating way. "Actually I haven't been able to do anything yet. I had another case to dispose of this morning. I did make an attempt to pick Gil Stevens's brains, but he told me I'd better go to the transcript of the trial, which I plan to do this afternoon. Mrs. Kincaid," he said, with a sidelong glance at Alex, "was just as uncommunicative as Stevens."

"You've talked to Dolly then?"

He lowered his voice. "I tried, yesterday. We've got to know where we stand before the police get to her."

"Is that going to happen?"

Jerry glanced around him at the courthouse crowd, and lowered his voice still further. "According to the grapevine, they were planning to make their move today, when they completed their ballistics tests. But something's holding them up. The Sheriff and the experts he brought in are still down in the shooting gallery under the courthouse."

"The bullet may be fragmented. It often is in head wounds. Or they may have s.h.i.+fted their main attention to another suspect. I see in the paper they've put out an APB for Thomas McGee."

"Yes, it was done yesterday. He's probably over the Mexican border by now."

"Do you consider him a major suspect, Jerry?"

"I'll want to read that transcript before I form an opinion. Do you?"

It was a hard question. I was spared having to answer it by a diversion. Two elderly ladies, one in serviceable black and one in fas.h.i.+onable green, looked in through the gla.s.s front door. They saw the waiting queue and turned away. The one in black was Mrs. Hoffman, Helen's mother. The other was Luke Deloney's widow.

I excused myself and went Out after them. They had crossed the street in the middle of the block and were headed downtown, moving through light and shadow under the giant yuccas that hedged the courthouse grounds. Though they seemed to keep up an incessant conversation, they walked together like strangers, out of step and out of sympathy. Mrs. Deloney was much the older, but she had a horsewoman's stride. Mrs. Hoffman stubbed along on tired feet.

I stayed on the other side of the street and followed them at a distance. My heart was thudding. Mrs. Deloney's arrival in California confirmed my belief that her husband's murder and Helen's were connected, and that she knew it.

They walked two blocks to the main street and went into the first restaurant they came to, a tourist trap with empty tables visible through its plate gla.s.s windows. There was an open-fronted cigar store diagonally across the street. I looked over its display of paperbacks, bought a pack of cigarettes, and smoked three or four which I lit at the old-fas.h.i.+oned gas flame, and eventually bought a book about ancient Greek philosophy. It had a chapter on Zeno which I read standing. The old ladies were a long time over lunch.

"Archer will never catch the old ladies," I said.

The man behind the counter cupped his ear. "What was that?"

"I was thinking aloud."

"It's a free country. I like to talk to myself when I'm off work. In the store here it wouldn't be appropriate." He smiled over the word, and his gold teeth flashed like jewelry.

The old ladies came out of the restaurant and separated. Mrs. Hoffman limped south, toward her hotel. Mrs. Deloney strode in the opposite direction, moving rapidly now that she was unenc.u.mbered by her companion. From the distance you could have taken her for a young woman who had unaccountably bleached her hair white.