Hilda’s face was pale and shiny, except for the dark crepe patches under her eyes. She said in a measured voice: “You’re a dirty old liar.”
He turned dead white. “So I’m a dirty old liar, am I?”
“Yes, and I’ll tell you why. You liked her too much. You were jealous of the boys, jealous of your own daughter—”
“You’re a crazy woman, talking like that in front of a stranger, blackening your old man.”
His voice strangled in his throat. His hand flew up as if of its own accord and struck her once, sharply, across the face.
“Don’t, Father.”
I stepped between them, facing Meyer. Emotion shook him the way a terrier shakes a rag. It let go of him suddenly. He collapsed on the davenport, limp as a corpse, but breathing audibly through his mouth.
I stood over him. “Meyer, who killed your daughter?”
“I don’t know,” he said in a thin old voice. “You’re not even sure she’s dead.”
“I’m sure enough. Did you kill her yourself?”
“You’re way off the beam. You’re as crazy as she is. I wouldn’t hurt a hair of Annie’s head.”
“You did once. And I wouldn’t throw words like ‘crazy’ around. They can boomerang.”
“Who you been talking to?”
“A person who knows your background, and what you did to Anne.”
He sat up unsteadily, his head lolling on his furred and wattled neck. “That was ten years ago. I was younger then, I didn’t have good control of myself.” His voice swayed heavily into self-pity. “It wasn’t all my fault. She ran around the house without her clothes. Played up to me the same as she did to the others. It got so I couldn’t keep her out of my room. I couldn’t stop myself. You don’t know how it was, being without a woman all those years.”
“Get a crying towel, old man. Don’t blubber to me. A man who did what you did would do murder.”
He shook his head violently from side to side, as if it was encumbered by invisible chickens coming home to roost. “It’s all over, all passed over. I never laid hands on Annie since that time.”
“What about the gun you said you gave her? Was that a straight story, Meyer?”
“Sure it was. Honest to God.” He crossed his chest with his finger, making the gesture seem obscene. “I gave her this old police positive that I had. She was scared of Aquista, see. If anybody killed her, it was Aquista. That stands to reason, don’t it?”
“Who killed Aquista, then?”
“Not me. If you think I knocked off my own driver, you’re nuts.” His red-veined gaze rose to my face and hardened. “Listen, mister, I don’t like this. I don’t like anything about this. You’re supposed to be working for me.”
“I resign.”
“That suits me down to the ground. Now get to hell out of my house.”
I started for the door.
“Wait a minute, you owe me a hundred dollars. I want it back.”
“Sue me.”
He tried to get to his feet and fell back onto the davenport. His breathing was fast and loud. His limbs jerked convulsively. I looked around for Hilda.
The screen door slammed.
CHAPTER 20: I went out after her, down the veranda steps, across the uncut lawn. She looked back and saw me coming, and started to run. At the edge of the vacant lot her feet got tangled in the rank crabgrass. She fell on her knees and huddled there, her hair veiling her face, her white nape bare to some unknown fatal ax.
I lifted her to her feet and kept one arm around her to steady her. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know. I can’t stay here with him. I’m afraid of him.” Her breasts moved against me like wild things caught in a net. “He’s an evil man, and he hates me. He’s hated us both from the time we were born. I remember the day Anne was born. My mother was dying, but he was angry with her. He wanted a son. He’d be glad to see me dead, too. I was a fool to come back here.”
“Why did you leave your husband, Mrs. Church?”
“He threatened me. He threatened to kill me if I set foot outside his house. But anything would be better than staying here.”
She looked up at the blind house-front and across the vacant lot strewn with its rusty car-frames. Beyond it, in the street, a black sedan turned the corner and stopped at the curb, abruptly. I saw the white Stetson emerge from the driver’s seat.
“Brand.” Her body went soft against my side, as if its bones had dissolved in acid terror.
He came across the vacant lot, walking stiffly on long pistonlike legs. I went to meet him. We faced each other on the narrow path.
“What are you doing with my wife?”
“You’d better ask her.”
“I’m asking you.” His large hands were open at his sides, but they were taut and trembling. “I told you to stay away from her. I also ordered you to drop this case.”
“It didn’t take. I’m on it, and I’m staying.”
“We’ll see about that. If you think you can disregard my orders, push my deputies around, and get away with it—” His teeth bit off the sentence. “I’m giving you a choice right now. Be out of my county in one hour, or stay and face felony charges.”
“The county belongs to you, eh?”
“Stick around and find out.”
“This is where I came in, Church. Every time I run into you, you have a bright new plan for getting me off the case. I’m slow in the mind, but when a thing like this goes on and doesn’t stop, I get a little suspicious. Just a little.”
“I’m not interested in your suspicions.”
“The D.A. ought to be, unless he’s as sour as you are. If your whole county government is sour, I’ll go higher.”
He looked up at the white colloidal sky. “What makes you think you can talk to me like this?”
There was something histrionic in the question. I suspected that his will was bending under pressure, that his integrity was already broken.
“The fact that you’re a phony. You know it. I know it. Your wife knows it.”
A pale line framed his mouth, almost as white and definite as a chalk line. “Are you trying to force me to kill you?”
“You haven’t the stuff.”
His lips stretched, uncovering his teeth, which glinted with gold souvenirs of childhood poverty. His eyes sank and darkened. I watched them for a signal. They shifted. His right shoulder dropped.
I ducked inside of his swing. His fist went by like a blundering bee, stinging my ear in flight. He staggered sideways off balance, open to a left to the jaw or a right to the middle. I let him have the right. His stomach was like a plank under his clothes. He blocked my left with his right forearm and countered with a left of his own. It caught the side of my head and whirled me around.
Hilda Church was crouched at the edge of the lot like a frightened animal. Her eyes were wide and empty, and her mouth was open in a silent scream.
I turned on Church with my face covered. His fists drove in under my elbows and doubled me over. I came up from underneath with an uppercut that turned his face to the sky. His hat fell off. He staggered backwards a few steps and went down. Rolled over and got up and came at me again.
His long left found my stomach, then my nose. Rain-bowed in my streaming vision, he pivoted from the waist and brought his hooked right over. It chopped me down. I got up onto my knees and felt his fist explode in my face again. It must have opened the gash in my brow. Liquid warmth ran into one of my eyes and turned the daylight red.
I got up and went after him with my head down and bulled inside his left and hammered his body. He dropped his guard. I looped a right at his jaw, felt the pain of the impact electric to my elbow. His dazed profile turned sideways, nimbused with red. I measured him with my left and put my weight behind a short right hook. He went down with his back against the side of a wheelless T-model.
He was slow getting up this time. His feet dragged in the withered grass. Gravity pulled at his arms. I could
have gone over his slipping guard and finished him. Instead I tied him up, partly because he was beaten and partly because the woman cried out behind me:
“Stop it! You have to stop it!”
I held his arms immobilized. His face was like a skull covered with stretched parchment. The scar in his temple was red and beating. He struggled to get loose, closing his eyes in the agony of effort. My blood ran onto him and mixed with his, and I had my first clear thought since the fight began. One of us was going to have to kill the other.
Fury surged through him again. He kneed me and flung himself backwards, out of my hold. He staggered sideways in the weeds, steadied himself on the wheelless car. There was a frozen stillness. I saw Church leaning sleepily on the car-frame, the trees steady in the windless heat, the mountains behind the trees ghostly and two-dimensional in the haze. His hand went to his hip in a jerky mechanical motion.
Fear ran through me like a jagged spark. I had a gun in my pocket. I didnt reach for it. That would be all he needed to make it self-defense. And he was law.
The .45 in his hand dragged him toward me. His slouching silence was worse than any words. If I was going to get it, this was the time and place, under a white valley sky, in the middle of a case I’d never solve. Sweat ran in cold runnels under my clothes, and the drip of blood from my chin counted off the seconds.
The woman stepped around me. “Brand. This man has been kind to me. He doesn’t mean any harm. Don’t hurt him. Please.”
Her hands reached for the gun and pushed it down. She walked close into him and stood with her face against his shoulder. “Say that you won’t hurt him. Please. There mustn’t be any more killing.”
He looked down at the top of her head as if he had never seen her before. Slowly his eyes focused.
“There won’t be any more.” His voice was deep in his throat. “I came to take you home, Hildie. Will you come home with me?”
She nodded, leaning against him like a dutiful doll.
“Go and get into the car, then. I’ll be along in a minute.”
“No more trouble? You promise?”
“No more trouble. I promise.”
He thrust the blue gun back into its holster. Their bodies came apart gradually like a giant cell dividing. She walked with stunned leisureliness along the path to the street. He watched her all the way until she was in the front seat with the door closed. Then he picked up his hat and turned to me, brushing it on his sleeve:
“I’m willing to forget about this, if you are.”
“I’m not, though.”
“You’re making a mistake.”
“You make your mistakes and I’ll make mine.”
“Damn it, Archer, can’t we get together?”
“Not on any terms that would suit you. I’m staying in Las Cruces until this thing is finished. Try slapping charges on me and I’ll show you a couple of charges of my own.”
“Such as?”
“Failure to do your duty. Conspiring with hoods.”
“No.” He reached for my arm. “You don’t understand.”
I stepped back out of his reach. “I understand this. I’m trying to solve two homicides, and something is trying to stop me. Something that looks like law and talks like law but doesn’t smell like law. Not in my nostrils. It smells like zombie meat. A zombie that takes the public’s money and sits behind a courthouse desk pretending to be an officer.”
“I’ve always done my duty.” But he said it without conviction. His anger had turned inward, and his corroded snarl was chewing on itself.
“Did you do it last night, when that truck broke out of the county?”
He didn’t answer. He stood and looked at the ground between us, then turned on his heel and walked toward his car, stumbling a little. The back of his coat was split. There was a streak of dirt on the crown of his Stetson. In the diffused light, his body cast a faint and wavering shadow.
CHAPTER 21: I found a doctor and had eight stitches put in my face. The doctor seemed to take it as a matter of course and asked no questions. When the job was finished, though, he asked me for twenty-five dollars in cash. He was that kind of a doctor, or I was that kind of a patient.
When I left his office, I had a powerful impulse to climb into my car and drive away from Las Cruces and never come back. I couldn’t think of a single solid reason for staying. So I drove across town to the courthouse, accompanied by my Messianic complex.
Its towered white concrete ell was surrounded by lawns as green as the artificial grass that undertakers use to hide the meaning of their work. Over the front entrance a basrelief of blind justice faced the sun. Far above her dim and bandaged head, the iron hands of the tower clock pointed at three thirty.
A tiled staircase led up to the District Attorney’s second-floor suite. In the anteroom a heavy blonde with commissar eyes surveyed me from behind the barricades of her bosom. After taking my name and consulting her intercom, she escorted me past several doors to the D.A.’s private office. It was a large sunlit room with a minimum of furniture. A few small human touches softened its bright impersonality: the photograph of a young and pretty woman on the desk, shelves of books that weren’t all law books, a pair of Don Freeman lithographs on the walls.
I’ve dealt with three main classes of district attorney. One is the slightly punchy, amiable type who has failed or almost failed in private practice and ended up in the courthouse, polishing apples for the people who put him there. One is the rising young lawyer who is using the office as a springboard to higher office or a richer practice. The third type, not so rare as it used to be, is the public servant who would rather live in a clean community than please a friend or get his picture in the paper.
Westmore seemed to belong in the second category. He offered me a cigarette and lit it for me, using the opportunity to study my face. His own was thin and jut-boned, ambitious-looking to the point of asceticism. It was masked with rimless spectacles and surmounted by a brush of prematurely gray hair like upright iron filings.
After placing a chair for me, he sat down behind his desk. “You’re an elusive character, Mr. Archer.”
“Sorry. I’ve had ground to cover.”
“You appear to have covered it on all fours.” His voice was sharp and intelligent, threaded with irony. “As a matter of fact, I was thinking seriously of having a warrant issued.”
“On what charge?”
“There are several possibilities. Resisting an officer, for instance. We take a fairly dim view of that sort of thing in Las Cruces.” His mouth was prim.
“You mean Church?”
“I mean Deputy Braga.”
“Braga got what was coming to him. I could have taken the girl if he hadn’t tackled me.”
“Braga realizes that now. However, I’d stay out of dark alleys if I were you. And I wouldn’t advise you to try it again, on Braga or anyone else in the sheriff’s department. The one thing that’s keeping you out of jail is the fact that you did report that car at the airport.”
“Church gave me credit for that?”
“Naturally. The sheriff gives credit where credit is due. And the Buick was what we needed to give us a lead on Bozey.”
“So Meyer told me. I take it Bozey hasn’t been caught.”
“Not yet. But I’ve had a teletype since I talked to Meyer. Bozey’s rap sheet stretches from here to there.” Westmore picked up a yellow flimsy from his out-basket and scanned it. “Petty theft and vandalism when he was still in grade school, repeated car theft in the next few years; carrying concealed weapons, mugging, holdup. The usual progression. Counting a year at Preston, he’s spent seven of the last eleven years behind walls.”
“Where does he come from?”
“The west side of Los Angeles, originally. But he’s been arrested in five Western states. His last conviction was for driving a truck for a gang of bootleggers in New Mexico. He got out in July and switched his operations to the Northwest.”
“Did he knock of
f the bank in Portland by himself?”
“So far as they know, it was a one-man job. At least he was the only one who entered the bank.”
“And he walked out with twenty thousand dollars?”
“Twenty-two thousand plus. Unfortunately for him, he couldn’t spend it. They had a fairly complete list of the stolen bills, and they circularized the coast and the whole Southwest. That car-purchase in Los Angeles seems to have been his only major attempt to pass any of it. He got the car all right, but the deal backfired. He had to clear out of Los Angeles with the police one jump behind him. They checked out of a Main Street hotel less than an hour before the police got there.”
“The girl was with him then?”
“They were registered as man and wife. Mr. and Mrs. John Brown.” A wry smile twitched at one corner of his mouth. “A highly appropriate alias, in view of what happened to the original John Brown.”
“When did they leave L.A.?”
“Six weeks ago, September the 3rd. He robbed the bank in Portland on August 15. From September the 3rd till yesterday he dropped out of sight completely.”
“Not quite,” I said.
He gave me a keen look. “Go on, if you know something more. I’ve taken you into my confidence.”
“Do you know where Lake Perdida is, Mr. Westmore?”
“I should, I have a cottage there. Why?”
“It’s one of the focal points of the case. Bozey and the Summer girl hid out there for several days in early September. And Anne Meyer was last seen at the lake—”
“How does she enter the picture?”
“She’s in the middle of it. I don’t know what efforts are being made to trace her. If it hasn’t been done, I suggest an APB.”
“The sheriff issued one on her last night. We’ve had no response so far.”
“I think you should center your search on Lake Perdida.”
“You must have reasons.”
“Yes.” I gave him the heel, and the keys to the cabin, and went through my story again.
He listened impatiently, tapping his desk with a restless hand, as if he could feel the seconds slipping away from under his fingers. “MacGowan may be lying. Doesn’t his story strike you as fantastic?”
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