“I’ve never heard that before. Who wrote it?”
“Shakespeare.”
“Fancy that. It must have been during one of his lighter moments.”
“It was.”
“Do you know any stories?”
“Some.”
“Will you tell me the one about how they all lived happily ever after?”
“Sure.”
Mother Pureza’s eyes brightened and she clapped her hands in delight. “Start right now. ‘Once upon a time there was a woman’—Go on, say it.”
“ ‘Once upon a time there was a woman.’ “ Bill repeated.
“ ‘Named Mary Alice Featherstone.’ “
“ ‘Named Mary Alice Featherstone.’ “
“ ‘And she lived happily ever after.’”
Lassiter watched them leave, wiping the sweat off his face with his shirt sleeve. “We’ll have to take her back to San Felice with us, County General Hospital, I guess. A hell of a thing, leaving an old lady alone like that.”
The immediate problem of Mother Pureza had overshadowed the fact of Haywood’s death. His body seemed hardly more than a prop of scenery against which real, live people were acting out their personal dramas.
“Are there any other buildings?” Lassiter said.
“A barn, a couple of washrooms, a storage shed.”
“Take a look around, will you? I’ll radio headquarters to send an ambulance and put out an A.P.B.”
Quinn went to the barn first. The lone occupant was a mother goat suckling her new kid. The truck and the green station wagon were gone. The washrooms were empty, too; the only sign of recent occupancy was a bar of gray gritty soap lying in a couple of inches of water in a tin basin. The pieces of wool used for towels were all dry, an indication to Quinn that the colonists had abandoned the place shortly after his departure. They had stayed long enough to clean up the kitchen, burn the evidence, cover Haywood’s body, then they had taken off.
The big question was, where could they have gone? Whatever their destination, they could hardly hope to escape notice, all of them robed and barefooted and the Brothers with their heads shaved. To avoid attracting immediate attention they must have changed to ordinary clothes, perhaps the very clothes they had worn when they first came to the Tower. It wasn’t like the Brothers to throw anything away.
Quinn walked quickly along the path to the storage shed. The small room where he had spent the night at the Tower seemed to be in the same condition as he had left it. The two blankets were still on the iron cot, and underneath them was Karma’s old school book which Sister Blessing had given him to read. The window was still open, the padlocks on the doors leading to the other compartments still in place. But on closer examination he saw that he was mistaken. One of the padlocks had been too carelessly or too hastily closed and had failed to snap shut. Quinn removed it and opened the door.
It was a small, square, windowless room that smelled of must and mildew. When his eyes adjusted to the dimness he could see that the place was filled with cardboard cartons of all sizes, some with lids, some without, some empty, some stuffed with clothing, books, handbags, hats, bundles of letters, hand mirrors, wallets, hair brushes, bottles of medicine, boxes of pills. There was a fan made of peacock feathers, an old-fashioned hand-crank phonograph, a miniature outrigger canoe constructed of matchsticks, a red velvet pillow pitted with holes, an abalone shell, a pair of hockey skates, a lamp with a tattered silk shade, a framed reproduction of Custer’s last stand, a headless doll and an oversized coffee mug with dad on it. Each of the cartons was labeled with the name of a member of the colony, printed in crayon.
One of the cartons looked new and bore the brand name of a detergent that had only recently been put on the market. It was labeled Brother Faith of Angels. Quinn carried it out, put it on the iron cot and opened the lid.
The dark gray fedora on top was identical to the hat he had seen George Haywood wearing when he had met Willie King at the empty house in Chicote. Both the hat and the dark gray suit underneath it came from Hadley & Son, Chicote, California. The white shirt, undershirt, shorts and two handkerchiefs carried the same laundry mark, HA 1389X. The black oxfords and striped blue tie were made by nationally known manufacturers and could have been bought anywhere. There was no wallet or personal papers of any kind.
He was in the act of replacing the clothes in the carton when Sheriff Lassiter appeared in the doorway.
“Find anything?” Lassiter said.
“George Haywood’s clothes, I think.”
“Let’s have a look.” He examined the items carefully, holding each one up to the light, squinting against the slanting rays of the sun. “Are there any more of these cartons?”
“Dozens.”
“O.K., we’d better get going on them.”
Sister Blessing’s was brought out first. A thick layer of dust on the lid indicated that it had not been opened for some time. It contained a black wool coat, some white uniforms, a flowered crepe dress, underclothes, two pairs of white nurses’ shoes, a calfskin handbag, a few pieces of costume jewelry, a man’s gold watch and chain, and a sheaf of letters, some very old, signed your loving husband, Frank, and a few more recent, signed Charlie. The last one was dated the previous December:
Dear Mother:
Once again I am writing to wish you a Merry Christmas from Florence and the two boys and myself. I only wish it could be a Merry Christmas for you. When are you going to come to your senses and leave that place? Surely there’s enough misery in the world without the extra you’re deliberately inflicting on yourself, for no sane reason. There’s plenty of room for you here, if you choose to reconsider.
Flo and the boys had the flu last month but we are all well now. I enclose twenty dollars. Spend it, save it, tear it up, but for the love of heaven don’t hand it over to that doom-spouting madman who seems to have you mesmerized.
Merry Christmas,
Charlie
Not even by reading between the lines could Quinn detect any sign of love or affection in the letter. Charles had written it in anger, and if he intended it as a real invitation for his mother to come and share his house, it was poorly expressed. Four words would have done the trick: We need you here.
“There’s no time to read letters now,” Lassiter said sharply.
“You’d better glance at it. It’s from her son, Charlie.”
“So?”
“You’ll probably have to phone him and break the news.”
“That will be pleasant. ‘Hello, Charlie, your old lady’s just been done in!’ “ He took the letter Quinn handed him and put it in his pocket. “O.K., let’s bring out the rest of the junk. I don’t want to be stuck in this joint all night.”
The hockey skates belonged to Brother Light of the Infinite, the abalone shell to Brother Behold the Vision, the lamp and coffee mug to Sister Contrition. It was Brother of the Steady Heart who had cranked the phonograph, Brother Tongue of Prophets who had glued together the outrigger, and Karma who had cherished the headless doll and the velvet pillow.
Underneath the pillow Quinn found several sheets of paper filled on both sides with single-spaced typing. It had obviously been done by someone just learning to type, on a machine whose ribbon was running out of ink. There were sentences, half-sentences, numbers, letters of the alphabet in order and in reverse order, lines of semicolons and punctuation marks, and, interspersed here and there, the name Karma.
Some of the sentences were factual, others adolescent fantasy:
My name is name is Karma; which I hate.
Because of my of my great beuaty beauty they are holding me prisoner in the tower in the forest. It is a sad fate for a princess.
Quin said ge he would bring me a magic presnt presant for my face but I don’t think ge he wil
l.
Today I said hell hell hell 3 times out loud.
The princess made a brade of her long hair and strangled all her enemies and got loose and re turned to the kingdom.
“What’s that?” Lassiter said.
“Some of Karma’s doodling on the typewriter.”
“There’s no typewriter here.”
“Whoever it belonged to must have taken it along.”
It seemed a logical conclusion and the subject was dropped.
The carton labeled Brother Crown of Thorns contained no sentimental mementos of the past, only a few pieces of clothing: a tweed suit and a sweater, both riddled by moths; a broadcloth shirt, a pair of shoes, and some woolen socks so full of holes they were barely recognizable. All of the articles had been lying undisturbed in the carton for a long time.
Quinn said suddenly, “Wait a minute.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Hold one of those shirts up against your chest as if you were measuring it for size.”
Lassiter held the shirt up. “Pretty good fit.”
“What size do you take?”
“Sixteen and a half.”
“Try the suit coat on, will you?”
“Just what are you getting at, Quinn? I don’t like messing around other people’s clothes.” But he tried the coat on anyway. It was too tight around the shoulders and the sleeves were too long.
“Now the sweater, I suppose?”
“If you don’t mind.”
The sweater was a fairly good fit except that once again the sleeves were too long.
“All right, Quinn.” Lassiter tossed the sweater back into the carton. “What’s the pitch?”
“A real sinker,” Quinn said. “Those clothes don’t belong to Brother Crown. He’s a man of medium build, a little on the short side even.”
“Maybe he’s lost weight since he arrived here—”
“His legs and arms didn’t shrink.”
“—Or the carton was mislabeled. There could be a dozen explanations.”
“There could be, yes. But I want the right one.”
Quinn carried the sweater, the coat and one of the shirts over to the doorway and examined them in sunlight. Neither the sweater nor the coat bore a manufacturer’s label. Inside the collar of the shirt there was a label, Arrow, 16Vz, 100% pure cotton, Peabody & Peabody, and the barely distinguishable remains of a laundry mark.
“Have, you got a magnifying glass, sheriff?”
“No, but I have twenty-twenty vision.”
“Try it on this laundry mark.”
“Looks like an H to begin with,” Lassiter said, blinking. “HR. Or maybe HA. That’s it, HAI or HAT.”
“How about HA one?”
“You may be right. HA one. The next looks like a 3 or a 2. Then an 8.”
“HA 1389X,” Quinn said.
Lassiter sneezed, partly from annoyance, partly from the dust hanging in the air like fog. “If you knew it already, why did you ask me?”
“I wanted to be sure.”
“You think it’s important?”
“That’s George Haywood’s laundry mark.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.” Lassiter sneezed again. “Judging from the amount of moth damage and dust, I’d say these things had been in here for years. What’s it add up to?”
“When Brother Crown first came to the Tower he was apparently wearing George Haywood’s clothes.”
“Why? And how did he get hold of them?”
Quinn wasn’t quite ready to answer the question though he was pretty sure he knew the answer. Willie King had given it to him the previous night in the courtyard motel. Of George, coming out of the anesthetic, she had said. “He was a scream. . . . He thought I was Alberta . . . and told me I was a silly old spinster who should know better. . . . He was mad at her . . . because she’d given away some of his clothes to a transient who’d come to the house. He called her a gullible, soft-hearted fool. . . . Alberta might be a fool but she’s neither gullible nor soft-hearted. If there really was a transient, and if she gave him some of George’s clothes, she must have had a reason besides simple generosity.”
Quinn felt a painful triumph rising inside him. The connection he’d been searching for, between Alberta Haywood and the murder of Patrick O’Gorman, was gradually becoming clear. The transient to whom she had given George’s clothes, the hitchhiker O’Gorman had picked up in his car, the writer of the confession letter to Martha O’Gorman, had all been the same man, Brother Crown of Thorns.
Questions still unanswered raced around in Quinn’s mind. Where was Brother Crown now? How had he managed to persuade the entire colony to disperse in order to save him from arrest? Was it George Haywood’s sudden appearance at the Tower that made Sister Blessing’s death necessary? And what reason besides simple generosity had prompted Alberta Haywood to hand over her brother’s clothes to a stranger? Suppose, though, that he was not a stranger, or didn’t remain one very long. Suppose Alberta, on opening the door to him, had sensed in him a desperation that matched her own and had offered him money to kill O’Gorman.
Quinn had been considering for some time the idea that O’Gorman had had a connection with, or at least knowledge of, Alberta’s embezzlements. It was impossible to believe O’Gorman had used his knowledge to blackmail her but he might have tried to talk to her, to reason with her: Now see here, Miss Haywood, you really shouldn’t be taking money from the bank, it’s not a nice thing to do. I think you ought to stop. You’re putting me in an awkward position. If I keep quiet about it, I’m condoning your crime—
Alberta was such a timid little creature it probably didn’t occur to O’Gorman that she might be capable of hiring a man to kill him.
Yes, it all fitted together, Quinn thought. Even now, back in her jail cell, Alberta was blaming O’Gorman for her plight. Her irrational claims that he was not dead might be caused by her inability to face her guilt, a refusal to admit that she had been responsible for his death. Then where did George fit into the picture? How long had he suspected his sister of planning O’Gorman’s murder? And were his regular visits to her intended to get at the truth or to conceal it?
“Give me a hand with these cartons,” Lassiter said. “We’d better take them along in case any of the Brothers gets the notion of coming back for them.”
“I don’t think they’ll be back.”
“Nor do I. But there are always buts. Where do you suppose they’re headed?”
“South, probably. The original colony was in the San Gabriel Mountains.”
Lassiter lit a cigarette, put out the match and broke it in two before tossing it out the door. “Now if I were the Master, which God forbid, that’s the last thing I’d do, unless I wanted to be caught. Even though they’ve all put on ordinary clothes, twenty-five people in a truck and a station wagon are pretty likely to attract attention.”
“So what would you do?”
“Disperse. Drive to the nearest big city, L.A., and separate completely. They don’t stand a chance in the mountains.”
“They don’t stand much of a chance in the city, either,” Quinn said. “They have no money.”
In the back seat, lulled by the motion of the car, Mother Pureza went to sleep sucking a Life Saver. With her legs drawn up and her chin dropped on her chest, she looked like a very old foetus.
Lassiter rode in the front. When they reached the main road he turned around to frown at Quinn. “You said there was a ranch near here?”
“Yes. The turn-off’s a couple of miles down the road.”
“We’ll have to stop by and get some help.”
“What kind of help?”
“Only a city boy would ask that,” Lassiter said with a grunt. “The livestock has to be looked after. Co
ws can’t milk themselves. It’s a funny darn thing, the Brothers walking off and leaving behind a valuable herd like that.”
“With only a truck and a station wagon, they had no alternative.”
“I wonder if there’s any possibility that they’re hiding out in the hills near here and intend to come back for the cattle, perhaps during the night. Being a city boy, you wouldn’t understand how much a colony like the Tower depends on its livestock. The herd looked healthy and well-tended.”
“It was,” Quinn said, remembering the intensity of Brother Light’s voice as he had spoken of the cattle, the sheep, the goats. Wherever Brother Light was now, in the hills nearby, in the San Gabriel Mountains, or in the city, Quinn knew what he would be thinking of as the sun set.
The turn-off to the ranch was marked by a wooden sign, Rancho Arido, decorated with horseshoes. Half a mile up the road they were met by a man driving a jeep with a couple of collies in the back seat, barking and wagging their tails furiously.
At the approach of the sheriff’s car the man stopped the jeep and climbed out.
“What’s up, Sheriff?”
“Hello, Newhouser,” Quinn said.
Newhouser leaned over and peered through the window. “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle, it’s you again, Quinn.”
“Yes.”
“Thought you’d be back in Reno by this time.”
“I hit a detour.”
“You know, Quinn, it’s been kind of on my conscience, my leaving you on the road like I did. I’m glad you’re O.K. You never can tell what’ll happen.”
Quinn’s sudden deep breath was like the gasp of a man drowning in a flash flood of memories. Riding the crest of the flood was Sister Blessing, smiling a greeting to him: “Welcome., stranger. . . . We never turn away the poor, being poor ourselves.”
“No,” he said quietly, “you never can tell what will happen.”
TWENTY
At nine o’clock Quinn was still in the sheriff’s office waiting for the operator to put through a call to Charlie Featherstone on the sheriff’s private phone. When the phone finally rang, Lassitter glanced first at it, then at Quinn:
How Like an Angel Page 24