Gertrude Haversack flushed angrily and bit her lower lip, and Willie had the satisfaction of knowing that she had finally scored. She owed this bitch a jolt or two, that was certain, and she might be able, before this was over, to think up something exceptionally unpleasant to do to her later.
“You might be interested to know that we were going away together,” Gertrude Haversack said. “We had it all arranged. Last Friday he got together all the money he could, which amounted to about twenty thousand dollars, and Saturday evening he was coming by to pick me up. I was all ready to go, all packed and everything, and I kept waiting and waiting for him, but he didn’t come, and finally I decided something had happened to change the plans, and that he would call me his first chance to explain what it was, but he didn’t call either. The next day, Sunday, I waited again to hear from him, and then, in the afternoon, a friend who knew about us called to tell me that she’d heard from someone or other that he’d left town suddenly Friday night. That’s the story that’s going around, that he left last Friday night and won’t be back, but it’s a lie. He didn’t leave then because we had planned to leave together on Saturday, as I said, and he had made all the arrangements, even to getting all that money together, and he would never have gone off without me like that at the last moment. No one knew we planned to go except him and me and this one good friend of mine, and what I want to know now is what happened to him.”
“In my opinion,” Willie said, “you have simply made all of this up, and what you have in mind to gain from such a fantastic lie is more than I can see. Do you just want to make trouble for me?”
“I wouldn’t mind making trouble for you.”
“Even if what you say is true, which I doubt, it’s obvious that he merely decided to go without you. Chances are he never had any intention of taking you in the first place. As I’ve recently learned, Howard could be very deceptive. I’m beginning to think he probably told lots of women lies in order to get what he wanted from them.”
“You’re only trying to be vindictive. He was happy with me, which he never was with you, and he wanted us to be together the rest of our lives. We were going to Mexico to live, at least until we got tired of it, and he was going to get a Mexican divorce while we were down there.”
“He may be going to Mexico, at that. I had a letter from him today from Dallas, Texas. Isn’t that on the way to Mexico, more or less?”
“You had a letter from him?”
“That’s what I said. From Dallas, Texas.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true whether you believe me or not.”
Gertrude Haversack stood up suddenly, and Willie thought for an instant that she would have to defend herself, but then the other woman became completely quiet, not moving in the slightest for several seconds, and there was an expression of slyness in her eyes.
“You could have written it yourself and had someone mail it from there. Is that what you did?”
“You really are crazy, aren’t you? I see that there’s no use at all in trying to talk reasonably with you.”
“I’m not crazy enough to believe for a moment that Howard would make all those careful arrangements to run away with me and then go off alone in the end. No one else will believe it, either. The police won’t.”
“Wont they? I’m not so sure. You would have to prove first that he actually made such arrangements. I think you’re a liar, and the police may too.”
“This friend of mine knew all about it. She’ll swear it’s true.”
“It isn’t difficult to get a friend to lie for you. She’ll only incriminate herself.”
“Think as you like. I know Howard didn’t go off voluntarily without me, and I’m sure I can be convincing enough to make the police suspicious. Then they’ll start asking a lot of questions they haven’t asked, and start checking a lot of things they wouldn’t otherwise check. Do you want that? I don’t think you do. I think, in fact, that you’d do a great deal to prevent it.”
“Now we’re coming to something, aren’t we? You haven’t told me yet just what it is you want, and it’s time you did.”
“It’s not so much what I want as what Howard would want. I was very fond of Howard, and I’d like to remember in the future that his wishes were considered.”
“Really? I’m touched. What were his wishes, exactly?”
“Well, it’s obvious, since he was going to take care of me, that he wanted me taken care of.”
“What would you consider being taken care of?”
“He had about twenty thousand dollars. We would have shared it.”
“I see. You are trying to blackmail me for ten thousand dollars.”
“Nothing of the sort. I’m only saying that it would be no more than fair to consider Howard’s wishes and take care of me as he planned.”
“Blackmail is blackmail, whatever you call it. Perhaps it’s I who should go to the police.”
“Go ahead.”
“Did you really expect to get away with this? If you did, there’s one thing you forgot to take into account.”
“Is that so? What is it?”
“That I’ve done nothing to be blackmailed for.”
“Oh, I expected you to say that, of course. You’d hardly admit anything. If you’ll think about it, though, you may decide that it’s worth something to you to avoid a great deal of unpleasantness.”
Willie walked to the door and turned. She was a perfect picture of composure, and on her small gamin’s face, as she stared back at Gertrude Haversack, there was an expression of fastidious disdain. She was aware of this herself, having accomplished it only by the greatest effort, and she was quite proud that she was able to dissemble so well the fear and uncertainty that she really felt.
“Have you said all you have to say?” she asked.
“For the present. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”
“Don’t wait too long.”
“I won’t. If I haven’t heard from you by tomorrow night, I’ll go to the police the next day. I want to give you every chance to do the right thing, of course.”
“Thank you so much,” Willie said. “It’s very good of you.”
She went on out and downstairs to the street. In the station wagon, she began to tremble so violently that it was impossible to drive, and so she lit a cigarette with the dash lighter, holding the lighter in her right hand and her right hand for support in her left hand. She sat there smoking the cigarette and gradually became calmer, but she was very cold in spite of the warm evening, and her hands and feet felt numb from the cold. It was essential to think clearly and to assess without panic the extent of the threat that Gertrude Haversack posed, but Willie’s thoughts could not be restrained or organized and kept flying off in all directions on tangents of the most terrible possibilities, and the only consistent thought she had, which did not help at all, was what a damn crying shame it was to have something like this arise just when everything was going so beautifully and looked like ending so well. Then, after the cigarette was finished, she thought that she must go at once to see Quincy, who would be at the Club now if he had not become tired of waiting and gone away again. Quincy was clever and full of plans. He had known what to do before, and he would know what to do now.
She felt compelled to hurry, to get to Quincy before he went away, but she drove out to the Club slowly, nevertheless, for her hands still trembled a little on the wheel, and her vision, for some reason, did not seem to be very clear. Parking in the lot in front of the Club, she walked around to the back terrace, descending a flight of outside steps to the lower level. The pool was deserted, the lifeguard reading a book in his elevated seat on one side. At one end of the terrace, an elderly couple were eating hamburger sandwiches and drinking beer and staring silently out across the golf course toward a little lake a hundred yards or so away. No one else was on the terrace or in sight, except the guard, so Willie walked over to the rear door of the Club and looked through the glass i
nto the bar, but Quincy wasn’t there either, and Willie began to tremble again in rising panic, as if her life depended upon finding Quincy at this moment and not a minute or an hour or any time later. She opened the door and entered the bar, and then she heard a familiar sound that gave her hope. Passing through the bar and around a corner, she came to the slot-machine room, and there, sure enough, was dear little Quincy with a glass in one hand and quarters in the other. She walked across from the door and stopped beside him, and he glanced at her sidewise before depositing another quarter and pulling the handle and watching the drum whirl around.
“What’s the matter, Cousin?” he said. “You look shook.”
“I’ve just had a very unpleasant experience,” she said.
“Did you see old Howard’s ghost or something?”
“Damn it, Quincy, please don’t joke. You’ve got to listen to me.”
“I’m listening, Cousin. Go ahead.” “Do you know a bitch named Gertrude Haversack?”
“No. Gertrude’s a bitch I’ve missed. Do you recommend her?”
“God damn it, Quincy, you simply must be serious.”
“Sorry, Cousin. Who’s Gertrude Haversack, and besides a bitch, what?”
“Well, among other things, it seems that she was Howard’s mistress.”
“Mistress? Howard’s? Come off, Cousin. With apologies to present company, who the hell in her right mind would want to share a bed with old Howard?”
“I just told you. Gertrude Haversack did.”
“All right. So she did. Are you disturbed? After all, Cousin, you never seemed to put a high value on marital fidelity. What’s sauce for the goose, as the saying goes, is sauce for the gander.”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Quincy. You’re far too clever to say such foolish things just when I need your help. It makes no difference to me what Howard did, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst is, Howard had planned to run away with her. They were going to leave Saturday evening for Mexico. That’s why he’d drawn out the money and cashed the bonds and done all those things, and now she is threatening to go to the police and tell them about it, and you can see yourself what the consequences will be. It’s hardly likely that Howard would have made such elaborate plans and then simply gone off without her. It will at least make the police suspicious and troublesome.”
All this time he had been feeding quarters into the machine, pulling the handle and watching the drum spin, but now he stopped, staring at two oranges and a plum. After several seconds had passed, he took a drink from the glass in his left hand and deposited another quarter from the supply in his right.
“Correct, Cousin,” he said. “It will at least make them suspicious and troublesome. Perhaps you had better relate your unpleasant experience with Gertrude Haversack from the beginning.”
So she did this, trying to remember every detail and every word that had been said, and in the meanwhile, as he listened, he continued to play the machine as if she were telling the most unimportant story that was hardly worth his attention, but the whir of the spinning drum and the occasional rattle of coins served the purpose of making it impossible for her to be overheard by anyone who might come in or pass by the open door, and perhaps this was what Quincy intended, being clever and almost always anticipating contingencies.
“It’s simply the rottenest kind of luck imaginable,” Willie said in finishing. “Whoever would have expected Howard to behave that way, the bastard. Not only did he help himself to practically all our money, but he was planning to spend it on this Gertrude Haversack in Mexico. By God, Quincy, I’ve never encountered such deception before, and all I can say is, he deserved the bitch he picked, and that’s the truth. Here she was, telling me over and over how fond she was of Howard and all that, and all the while she didn’t really care in the least what might have happened to him if I would only agree to give her ten thousand dollars. It was disgusting, that’s what it was.”
“Oh, well,” Quincy said, “you mustn’t be indignant. You’ll have to admit that we’re not in a particularly good position for throwing stones, and what we’d better think about is what must be done, if anything, with Gertrude Haversack.”
“That’s why I came out here immediately to see you. You always have such good ideas.”
“Ideas are the products of brains, Cousin. You can’t have one without the other. As I see it, we have four alternatives, which we’ll consider. First, we could dispose of Gertrude as we disposed of Howard, but it hardly seems advisable. You can’t go on disposing of people indefinitely without expecting to get caught, and, besides, there is this unidentified friend of Gertrude’s who apparently knows what’s going on. She would certainly run directly to the police if Gertrude were to disappear suddenly, and we would only have made worse what is already bad enough.
“Let’s pass on, therefore, to the second alternative, which has, I confess, a quality of boldness that appeals to me. You could go to the police yourself and accuse Gertrude of trying to blackmail you. This would attract attention to you, of course, but it would give you a psychological advantage of acting like an honest woman with nothing to fear, and if Gertrude does go to the police, as she threatens, attention will be attracted to you anyhow.
“Next, you could pay the ten thousand. Against this are the indignity of submission, the tantamount confession of guilt, and the considerable cost, which is no small item.
“Finally, Cousin, we could do nothing. There’s always the chance that Gertrude is bluffing, and if she is, it would be unfortunate, as well as humiliating, to be tricked into drawing attention that could have been avoided. And in the final analysis, you have the comfort of knowing that not a damn thing can be done by the police or anyone else, whatever Gertrude says, unless someone comes up with old Howard himself, which is not probable. My advice, Cousin, is to do nothing and let Gertrude do what she will.”
Willie sighed and shook her head slowly in admiration and gratitude. She was vastly reassured by Quincy’s brilliant analysis, especially the bit about Howard himself being necessary to any action by the police, which was a point she had not given sufficient attention, and it was, she thought, simply incredible how this lovable and handy little devil could make everything seem all right, or almost all right, that had seemed all wrong before.
“Quincy,” she said, “how can I ever repay you?”
“There are ways,” he said, pulling the handle of the slot machine, “which we will go into in good time.”
FOURTEEN
At approximately ten o’clock, the morning of Wednesday, Lieutenant Elgin Necessary was sitting comfortably behind his desk at police headquarters with nothing to do that had to be done immediately. He was thinking of Willie Hogan at the time, which might have been considered a coincidence, in the light of what was about to happen, if he had not been thinking of Willie practically all the time, when he was thinking at all, ever since Monday afternoon. He had even dreamed of her once, and it had been a pleasant dream, although not a dream that one would be likely to tell before breakfast, or any other time.
Thinking his pleasant thoughts, creating, in fact, a little fantasy with a beginning and an end, he was so abstracted that he was not aware that he had company until Sergeant Ned Muller, who was half of it, cleared his throat to attract attention. Necessary, returning reluctantly to reality, saw that Muller had with him a rather large young woman, well proportioned, with an adequate face now frozen in lines of rather self-righteous determination. Necessary had seen such faces before, and his heart sank. Standing, he had a notion that he was about to acquire something to do that would need doing immediately.
Muller said: “Lieutenant, here’s a lady I think you’d better talk with. This is Lieutenant Necessary, Miss Haversack. Lieutenant, Miss Gertrude Haversack.”
Necessary extended his hand and said How do you do, and Miss Haversack took the hand briefly and nodded and said nothing. Necessary invited her to sit down in the chair beside his desk, and she said Thank you, and d
id, arranging her skirt over her knees. Sergeant Muller went away, wondering if he had performed the introduction properly. He was never quite certain afterward, and it distressed him.
“What can I do for you, Miss Haversack?” Necessary said.
“I’ve come to see you about a missing person,” Gertrude Haversack said.
“I see. What person is missing?”
“A friend of mine. His name is Howard Hogan. He’s been missing since Friday night, I understand.”
“That’s right. We’ve already looked into the matter, Miss Haversack. As a matter of fact, he’s been located. We know, at any rate, where he was at a certain time. He sent a letter from Dallas, Texas.”
“That’s what I want to talk about. I don’t believe he was ever in Dallas, Texas, because I don’t believe he ever left Quivera voluntarily at all.”
Necessary stared at her for a few moments sourly, his heart sinking deeper and deeper. Oh, Jesus, he thought. Oh, good Jesus.
“Why don’t you believe it?” he said.
She shifted her weight in the chair, arranging her skirt over her knees again in a sort of reflexive way that was rather significant, Necessary thought, when he remembered it later in association with what she had to say.
“It’s rather embarrassing,” she said. “It has been quite difficult for me to come here.”
“Is that why you’ve delayed so long in coming? As you said, Mr. Hogan left home, or disappeared, last Friday. Several days ago.”
“Yes, I suppose it is. That’s not the only reason, however. I kept thinking things might be satisfactorily explained in one way or another, but now I don’t think so.”
“Well, now that you are here, suppose you just tell me directly why you think Mr. Hogan did not voluntarily leave town.”
“Howard—Mr. Hogan—and I were good friends. Quite good friends. We had been seeing each other regularly for about a year. To be frank, we had finally planned definitely to go away together. We were going first to Mexico, where he planned to get a divorce. We intended to leave together last Saturday evening, and he had made all arrangements, including getting his finances in order.”
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