"I only saw her the once. She said hello-how-are-you and that was about it. She told her mother that she'd had it with Bert and her mother couldn't talk her out of it. Bert even followed her out to Reno to try and convince her to come back, but it was no go. He isn't enough of a man to hold a woman."
Hoffman finished his drink and set his tumbler down on the floor. He remained slumped forward for about a minute, and I was afraid he was going to get sick or pass out on me. But he came back up to a sitting position and muttered something about wanting to help me.
"Fine. Who was Luke Deloney?"
"Friend of mine. Big man in town back before the war. She told you about him, too, eh?"
"You could tell me more, Lieutenant. I hear you have a memory like an elephant."
"Did Helen say that?"
"Yes." The lie didn't cost me anything, not even a pang of conscience.
"At least she had some respect for her old man, eh?"
"A good deal."
He breathed with enormous relief. It would pass, as everything passes when a man is drinking seriously to kill awareness. But for the moment he was feeling good. He believed his daughter had conceded a point in their bitter life-long struggle.
"Luke was born in nineteen-oh-three on Spring Street," he said with great care, "in the twenty-one-hundred block, way out on the south side--two blocks over from where I lived when I was a kid. I knew him in grade school. He was the kind of a kid who saved up his paper-route money to buy a Valentine for everybody in his class. He actually did that. The principal used to take him around to the various rooms to show off his mental arithmetic. He did have a good head on his shoulders, I'll give him that. He skipped two grades. He was a corner.
"Old man Deloney was a cement finisher, and cement started to come in strong for construction after the World War. Luke bought himself a mixer with money he'd saved and went into business for himself. He did real well in the twenties. At his peak he had over five hundred men working for him all over the state. Even the depression didn't cramp his style. He was a wheeler and a dealer as well as a builder. The only things going up in those days were public works, so he went out in a big way for the federal and state contracts. He married Senator Osborne's daughter, and that didn't do him any harm, either."
"I hear Mrs. Deloney's still alive."
"Sure she is. She lives in the house the Senator built in nineteen-oh-one on Glenview Avenue on the north side. Number one-oh-three, I think." He was straining to live up to his encyclopedic reputation.
I made a mental note of the address. Preceded by clinking, Bert Haggerty came into the room with ice and water and glasses on a tin tray. I cleared a space on the desk and he set the tray down. It had originally belonged to the Bridgeton Inn.
"You took long enough," Hoffman said offhandedly.
Haggerty stiffened. His eyes seemed to regroup themselves more closely at the sides of his nose.
"Don't talk to me like that, Earl. I'm not a servant."
"If you don't like it you know what you can do."
"I realize you're tight, but there's a limit--"
"Who's tight? I'm not tight."
"You've been drinking for twenty-four hours."
"So what? A man has a right to drown his sorrows. But my brain is as clear as a bell. Ask Mr. Arthur here. Mr. Archer."
Haggerty laughed, mirthlessly, falsetto. It was a very queer sound, and I tried to cover it over with a broad flourish:
"The Lieutenant's been filling me in on some ancient history. He has a memory like an elephant."
But Hoffman wasn't feeling good any more. He rose cumbrously and advanced on Haggerty and me. One of his eyes looked at each of us. I felt like a man in a cage with a sick bear and his keeper.
"What's funny, Bert? You think my sorrow is funny, is that it? She wouldn't be dead if you were man enough to keep her at home. Why didn't you bring her home from Reno with you?"
"You can't blame me for everything," Haggerty said a little wildly. "I got along with her better than you did. If she hadn't had a father-fixation--"
"Don't give me that, you lousy intellectual. Ineffectual. Ineffectual intellectual. You're not the only one that can use fourbit words. And stop calling me Earl. We're not related. We never would have been if I had any say in the matter. We're not even related and you come into my house spying on my personal habits. What are you, an old woman?"
Haggerty was speechless. He looked at me helplessly.
"I'll break your neck," his father-in-law said.
I stepped between them. "Let's have no violence, Lieutenant. It wouldn't look good on the blotter."
"The little pipsqueak accused me. He said I'm drunk. You tell him he's mistaken. Make him apologize."
I turned to Haggerty, closing one eye. "Lieutenant Hoffman is sober, Bert. He can carry his liquor. Now you better get out of here before something happens."
He was glad to. I followed him out into the hall.
"This is the third or fourth time," he said in a low voice. "I didn't mean to set him off again."
"Let him cool for a bit. I'll sit with him. I'd like to talk to you afterward."
"I'll wait outside in my car."
I went back into the bear cage. Hoffman was sitting on the edge of the couch with his head supported by his hands.
"Everything's gone to hell in a hand-car," he said. "That pussy willow of a Bert Haggerty gets under my skin. I dunno what he thinks he's sucking around for." His mood changed. "You haven't deserted me, anyway. Go ahead, make yourself a drink."
I manufactured a light highball and brought it back to the couch. I didn't offer Hoffman any. In wine was truth, perhaps, but in whisky, the way Hoffman sluiced it down, was an army of imaginary rats climbing your legs.
"You were telling me about Luke Deloney and how he grew."
He squinted at me. "I don't know why you're so interested in Deloney. He's been dead for twenty-two years. Twenty-two years and three months. He shot himself, but I guess you know that, eh?" A hard intelligence glinted momentarily in his eyes and drew them into focus on my face.
I spoke to the hard intelligence: "Was there anything between Helen and Deloney?"
"No, she wasn't interested in him. She had a crush on the elevator boy. George. I ought to know, she made me get him the job. I was sort of managing the Deloney Apartments at the time. Luke Deloney and me, we were like that."
He tried to cross his second finger over his forefinger. It kept slipping. He finally completed the maneuver with the help of his other hand. His fingers were thick and mottled like uncooked breakfast sausages.
"Luke Deloney was a bit of a womanizer," he said indulgently, "but he didn't mess around with the daughters of his friends. He never cared for the young stuff, anyway. His wife must of been ten years older than he was. Anyway, he wouldn't touch my daughter. He knew I'd kill him."
"Did you?"
"That's a lousy question, mister. If I didn't happen to like you I'd knock your block off."
"No offense."
"I had nothing against Luke Deloney. He treated me fair and square. Anyway, I told you he shot himself."
"Suicide?"
"Naw. Why would he commit suicide? He had everything, money and women and a hunting lodge in Wisconsin. He took me up there personally more than once. The shooting was an accident. That's the way it went into the books and that's the way it stays."
"How did it happen, Lieutenant?"
"He was cleaning his .32 automatic. He had a permit to tote it on his person--I helped him get it myself--because he used to carry large sums of money. He took the clip out all right but he must of forgot the shell that was in the chamber. It went off and shot him in the face."
"Where?"
"Through the right eye."
"I mean where did the accident occur?"
"In one of the bedrooms in his apartment. He kept the roof apartment in the Deloney building for his private use. More than once I drank with him up there. Prewar Green River, bo
y." He slapped my knee, and noticed the full glass in my hand. "Drink up your drink."
I knocked back about half of it. It wasn't prewar Green River. "Was Deloney drinking at the time of the shooting?"
"Yeah, I think so. He knew guns. He wouldn't of made that mistake if he was sober."
"Was anybody with him in the apartment?"
"No."
"Can you be sure?"
"I can be sure. I was in charge of the investigation."
"Did anybody share the apartment with him?"
"Not on a permanent basis, you might say. Luke Deloney had various women on the string. I checked them out, but none of them was within a mile of the place at the time it happened."
"What kind of women?"
"All the way from floozies to one respectable married woman here in town. Their names didn't go into the record then and they're not going to now."
There was a growl in his voice. I didn't pursue the subject. Not that I was afraid of Hoffman exactly. I had at least fifteen years on him, and a low alcohol content. But if he went for me I might have to hurt him badly.
"What about Mrs. Deloney?" I said.
"What about her?"
"Where was she when all this was going on?"
"At home, out on Glenview. They were sort of separated. She didn't believe in divorce."
"People who don't believe in divorce sometimes believe in murder."
Hoffman moved his shoulders belligerently. "You trying to say that I hushed up a murder?"
"I'm not accusing you of anything, Lieutenant."
"You better not. I'm a cop, remember, first last and always." He raised his fist and rotated it before his eyes like a hypnotic device. "I been a good cop all my life. In my prime I was the best damn cop this burg ever saw. I'll have a drink on that." He picked up his tumbler. "Join me?"
I said I would. We were moving obscurely on a collision course. Alcohol might soften the collision, or sink him. I finished my drink and handed him my glass. He filled it to the brim with neat whisky. Then he filled his own. He sat down and stared into the brown liquid as if it was a well where his life had drowned.
"Bottoms up," he said.
"Take it easy, Lieutenant. You don't want to kill yourself." It occurred to me as I said it that maybe he did.
"What are you, another pussy willow? Bottoms up."
He drained his glass and shuddered. I held mine in my hand. After a while he noticed this.
"You didn't drink your drink. What you trying to do, pull a fast one on me? Insult my hosh--my hoshpit--?" His lips were too numb to frame the word.
"No insult intended. I didn't come here for a drinking party, Lieutenant. I'm seriously interested in who killed your daughter. Assuming Deloney was murdered--"
"He wasn't."
"Assuming he was, the same person may have killed Helen. In view of everything I've heard, from her and other people, I think it's likely. Don't you?"
I was trying to get his mind under my control: the sloppy drunken sentimental part, and the drunken violent part, and the hard intelligent part hidden at the core.
"Deloney was an accident," he said clearly and stubbornly.
"Helen didn't think so. She claimed it was murder, and that she knew a witness to the murder."
"She was lying, trying to make me look bad. All she ever wanted to do was make her old man look bad."
His voice had risen. We sat and listened to its echoes. He dropped his empty glass, which bounced on the rug, and clenched the fist which seemed to be his main instrument of expression. I got ready to block it, but he didn't throw it at me.
Heavily and repeatedly, he struck himself in the face, on the eyes and cheeks, on the mouth, under the jaw. The blows left dull red welts in his clay-colored flesh. His lower lip split.
Hoffman said through the blood: "I clobbered my poor little daughter. I chased her out of the house. She never came back."
Large tears the color of pure distilled alchohol or grief rolled from his puffing eyes and down his damaged face. He fell sideways on the couch. He wasn't dead. His heart was beating strongly. I straightened him out--his legs were as heavy as sandbags--and put a bolster under his head. With blind eyes staring straight up into the light, he began to snore.
I closed the roll-top desk. The key was in it, and I turned it on the liquor and switched off the light and took the key outside with me.
chapter 20
Bert Haggerty was sitting in the Chevrolet coupé, wearing a stalled expression. I got in beside him and handed him the key.
"What's this?"
"The key to the liquor. You better keep it. Hoffman's had as much as he can take."
"Did he throw you out?"
"No. He passed out, while hitting himself in the face. Hard."
Haggerty thrust his long sensitive nose toward me. "Why would Earl do a thing like that?"
"He seemed to be punishing himself for hitting his daughter a long time ago."
"Helen told me about that. Earl treated her brutally before she left home. It's one thing I can't forgive him for."
"He can't forgive himself. Did Helen tell you what they quarreled about?"
"Vaguely. It was something to do with a murder here in Bridgeton. Helen believed, or pretended to believe, that her father deliberately let the murderer go free."
"Why do you say she pretended to believe it?"
"My dear dead wife," he said, wincing at the phrase, "had quite a flair for the dramatic, especially in her younger days."
"Did you know her before she left Bridgeton?"
"For a few months. I met her in Chicago at a party in Hyde Park. After she left home I helped her to get a job as a cub reporter. I was working for the City News Bureau then. But as I was saying, Helen always had this dramatic flair and when nothing happened in her life for it to feed on she'd _make_ something happen or pretend that it had happened. Her favorite character was Mata Hari," he said with a chuckle that was half a sob.
"So you think she invented this murder?"
I suppose I thought so at the time, because I certainly didn't take it seriously. I have no opinion now. Does it matter?"
"It could matter very much. Did Helen ever talk to you about Luke Deloney?"
"Who?"
"Luke Deloney, the man who was killed. He owned the apartment building they lived in, and occupied the penthouse himself."
Haggerty lit a cigarette before he answered. His first few words came out as visible puffs of smoke: "I don't recall the name. If she talked about him, it couldn't have made much of an impression on me."
"Her mother seems to think Helen had a crush on Deloney."
"Mrs. Hoffman's a pretty good woman, and I love her like a mother, but she gets some wild ideas."
"How do you know that this one is so wild? Was Helen in love with _you_ then?"
He took a deep drag on his cigarette, like an unweaned child sucking on a dry bottle. It burned down to his yellow fingers. He tossed it into the street with a sudden angry gesture.
"She never was in love with me. I was useful to her, for a while. Later, in some sense, I was the last chance. The faithful follower. The last chance for gas before the desert."
"The desert?"
"The desert of love. The desert of unlove. But I don't think I'll go into the long and dreary chronicle of my marriage. It wasn't a lucky one, for either of us. I loved her, as far as I'm able to love, but she didn't love me. Proust says it's always that way. I'm teaching Proust to my sophomore class this fall, if I can summon up the _élan_ to go on teaching."
"Who did Helen love?"
"It depends on which year you're talking about. Which month of which year." He didn't move, but he was hurting himself, hitting himself in the face with bitter words.
"Right at the beginning, before she left Bridgeton."
"I don't know if you'd call it love, but she was deeply involved with a fellow-student at the City College. It was a Platonic affair, the kind bright young people have, or use
d to have. It consisted largely of reading aloud to each other from their own works and others'. According to Helen, she never went to bed with him. I'm pretty sure she was a virgin when I met her."
"What was his name?"
"I'm afraid I don't remember. It's a clear case of Freudian repression."
"Can you describe him?"
"I never met him. He's a purely legendary figure in my life. But obviously he isn't the elusive murderer you're searching for. Helen would have been happy to see _him_ go free." He had withdrawn from the pain of memory and was using an almost flippant tone, as if he was talking about people in a play, or watching ceiling movies at the dentist's. "Speaking of murder, as we seem to be doing, you were going to tell me about my ex-wife's death. She's completely ex now, isn't she, exed out?"
I cut in on his sad nonsense and gave him the story in some detail, including the man from Reno who ran away in the fog, and my attempts to get him identified. "Earl tells me you went to Reno last summer to see your wife. Did you run into any of her acquaintances there?"
"Did I not. Helen played a trick on me involving a couple of them. Her purpose was to stall off any chance for an intimate talk with me. Anyway, the one evening we spent together she insisted on making it a foursome with this woman named Sally something and her alleged brother."
"Sally Burke?"
"I believe that _was_ her name. The hell of it was, Helen arranged it so that I was the Burke woman's escort. She wasn't a bad-looking woman, but we had nothing in common, and in any case it was Helen I wanted to talk to. But she spent the entire evening dancing with the brother. I'm always suspicious of men who dance too well."
"Tell me more about this brother. He may be our man."
"Well, he struck me as a rather sleazy customer. That may be projected envy. He was younger than I am, and healthier, and better looking. Also, Helen seemed to be fascinated by his line of chatter, which I thought was pointless--all about cars and horses and gambling odds. How a highly educated woman like Helen could be interested in such a man--" He tired of the sentence, and dropped it.
"Were they lovers?"
"How would I know? She wasn't confiding in me."
"But you know your own wife, surely."
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