Obit Delayed

by Nielsen, Helen

  “I haven’t exactly found the murderer,” Peter corrected with assumed modesty, “but I did run across something that has set up a statewide hunt. Now what I want to do is to run this picture of the man the police are looking for. The man they think killed Virginia Wales.”

  It was more than just a picture of a man that Peter shoved under Mitch’s nose. It was a family album item with a blonde easily recognizable, despite a dress dated like a television movie, and a man she was playing handsies with who could have been almost anybody except her brother. “Frank Wales,” Peter volunteered. “Her ex-husband. According to the inscription on the back, this was taken at their wedding in 1936. They were divorced three years ago.”

  Now that Mitch noticed, the man did have a newly wedded look—but he didn’t fit. He was too common, too Mr. Average Man. Not that a man couldn’t look like a grocery clerk and still be a murderer, but how, Mitch wondered, could he be married to a number like the blonde? Even in so old a photo Frank Wales showed signs of an impending bay window, and his hairline couldn’t have been that high all his life. He must have held a fifteen-year edge on his vivacious bride.

  “He doesn’t look like a jitterbugger to me,” Mitch muttered, and then, because that wouldn’t make sense even to Lois, added—“Why should a man kill his wife three years after their divorce?”

  “Maybe for the same reason he drove over five hundred miles to see her the day of her death,” Peter said.

  This, obviously, was the part of the story Peter was waiting to tell, and tell it he did, complete with personal pronouns. Murders weren’t so common in Valley City that they could be run as fillers, and Mitch’s brief note had called for a little follow-up, with sensational results. Peter had gone straight to the scene of the crime only to find the tiny house deserted except for a disgruntled guard.

  “Everybody’s scared to go near the place, I guess,” he commented. “People are peculiar down at that end of town.”

  The guard was disgruntled because he wanted a break for coffee, and Peter, remembering his scouting, volunteered for a good deed. Left alone in the house, he lost no time in digging up the wedding picture. Even then he was thinking of the front page. “I was still nosing around,” he explained, “when a car drove up to the curb and a woman got out. She stood on the sidewalk a few moments and then walked up to where I was waiting in the doorway. ‘Is this Virginia Wales’s residence?’ she asked. I told her that it was. ‘Is she in?’ I had to admit that she wasn’t, but asked if she wanted to come in and wait.”

  Peter smiled reminiscently. Somebody was going to appreciate his quick thinking even if he had to do it himself.

  “She came in and introduced herself—Mrs. Wales, the same name as the dead woman. I asked if she might be a relative, and she explained that she was married to Virginia’s ex-husband. That’s when things began to add up.”

  “Peter’s good at figures,” The Duchess remarked, “especially female.”

  It was a nice try, but nothing could stop Peter now. “I’d already noticed the upstate dealer’s nameplate on her car,” he added, “and she looked as if she’d had a rough trip. I sized her up a few minutes, and then came right out and asked if she’d come looking for her husband. She was caught too far off base to deny anything; besides, I was very big-brotherly. By the time Talbot’s man returned we were bosom friends.”

  Peter finished off his tale with a wide grin. It didn’t bother him that he had tricked a worried wife into betraying her husband, and why should it? It was all in the cause of justice and Papa Parsons’s checkbook. This was the way people went about collecting annuities and swimming-pools, and if Mitch had been the editor Papa expected for his money, he’d have been slapping the kid on the back instead of thinking what a louse he was. And it was all sour grapes. He might have beaten Peter to the story if he hadn’t been so busy pounding his ear.

  “Well, do we run the picture?”

  Mitch pulled his mind back out of the fog and looked at that dated print again. The kid was smart, all right. There must have been dozens of pictures in that album, but he’d chosen one that made the murdered Virginia all life and laughter, and the self-conscious clod at her side couldn’t solicit sympathy from an old maids’ home.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “It’s your story.”

  He might as well have knelt at Peter’s feet.

  Having made the momentous decision, Mitch retired to the plywood cell that was supposed to be his private office. Nothing was private at the Independent except the ladies’ room, but it was the only sanctuary he had and he tried to make the best of it. It wasn’t easy, especially since the door had warped in that unusual rain they’d had last winter; but open or closed, The Duchess would have barged in anyway.

  She might have held first mortgage on the place from the casual way she appropriated the silver cigarette lighter on Mitch’s desk (a gift from Papa Parsons in happier days), and then squeezed into one of the oak chairs that faced his own. There really wasn’t anything wrong with her figure that a good foundation couldn’t handle; but The Duchess liked her freedom. She was, Mitch reflected, the only thing about the Independent that lived up to its name.

  “I suppose you’ve come for the post-mortem,” he said, when she was finally settled.

  The Duchess wrinkled her noble nose. “Now, it can’t be that bad!”

  This time she was wrong. Mitch rocked back in his chair and squinted up at the high ceiling. He was remembering the touching scene that had taken place just before he set out to corner Papa’s Martini supply, and decided to give The Duchess a quick replay. “Mitchell, my boy,” he began, giving the lines all the Parsons possible, “I’m worried about you. I’m afraid you’re working too hard. Don’t you have some bright boy in the office who could take charge while you go on a little vacation?”

  “Oh, no!” moaned The Duchess.

  “Exactly. The familiar boot all dressed up in velvet spats.”

  “Maybe he means it.”

  Mitch had to smile over that. He knew Papa’s style, and he could just see the old man worrying about the health of Mitchell Gorman. “Not Papa,” he said. “We understand each other too well. Five years ago he handed me his pet newspaper and then sat back to wait for the miracles. Well, it’s finally dawned on him that I’m no miracle man, so he wants another boy. Guess who?”

  The Duchess winced, which was answer enough.

  “He’s earned it,” Mitch added. “God, how he’s earned it!”

  “Maybe if you weren’t so damned lazy—”

  That was what Mitch liked about The Duchess; she was so tactful. She was also much too near the truth for comfort; but when he resisted with a—“Please, no lectures today!” she shrugged and tapped a cigarette ash into the wastebasket. “Or any other day,” she said. “You’re a big boy now. If you choose to sit on your fat fanny and let Junior walk off with your job, it’s nothing to me.”

  She was trying to get a rise out of him, but he was too smart for her. She was sitting there scrutinizing him through that veil of smoke, wondering whatever had become of the Mitch Gorman of five years past, and sometimes Mitch wondered, too. Maybe he had dehydrated—but that wasn’t very original. Every bum who wanted to roll over and die blamed it on the valley.

  It wasn’t the valley at all. It was an accumulation of things he wasn’t going to analyze, because that would mean getting all fouled up in a web of whences and whithers and what fors that nobody could answer. It was better to let sleeping dogs lie. All Mitch wanted now was plenty of peace and quiet, with the days following one another like sheep and somebody else tending the flock.

  “Papa’s right,” he concluded. “Let the new boys take over. Maybe they can make something of the world; it’s too much for me.”

  The swishing noise was The Duchess extricating herself from the chair and getting out fast. But not without a parting shot.

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” she snapped. “I’ve got a wedding to cover. If I run across a petitio
ner for the Townsend Plan, I’ll send him right over!”

  So much for The Duchess, and so much for Mitch Gorman—that weary old has-been of thirty-seven. Now that he’d hit the bottom of this morbid mood, Mitch began to grin. Since when was thirty-seven old? He toyed around with the number for a thought or two, and then, without any help at all, it acquired a couple of digits and became a date engraved on a blood-smeared dance trophy. 1937. “The year of our Lord,” he murmured, wondering why that gold-plated gadget wouldn’t leave his mind alone. Then, as if the words had started a chain reaction, he began to get the picture.

  It didn’t matter where the Merryland Ballroom might have been; Merryland Ballrooms were all the same. All had the same blaring bands, the same colored lights, the same smoke and sweat and bouncing bodies. Virginia Wales slipped into the picture as natural as life. Mitch wasn’t one of Pinky’s prize patrons, but a blonde with a smile like Virginia’s had a way of sticking in the memory. The only difficult thing was trying to realize that she was dead.

  And now Mitch knew what was happening. He was letting his imagination run away with him; he was working himself into a state of mind where he’d have to leave this air-cooled office and go nosing about, asking questions and making a general nuisance of himself. And all because that clumsy bridegroom in Peter’s appropriated photograph didn’t look lively enough to lift one foot after the other, let alone win a jitterbug contest with his bride! But if he hadn’t danced with his dancing bride, who did? And who danced with her when Frank Wales was no longer about? These were the kind of questions that interested Mitch in his rare moments of curiosity.

  Besides, it would be worth a touch of sunstroke just to watch Peter wilt if it turned out that Frank Wales had been visiting a maiden aunt in Azusa.

  3

  VALLEY CITY didn’t go in for elaborate municipal buildings. The city hall wouldn’t fool anybody into thinking it was an opera house, and around in back, where they relegated all the old furnishings nobody else wanted, and where the yellow walls of the corridors were just a little dirtier than anywhere else, there was an office door with Captain Talbot spelled out in black letters. Mitch could see it from the anteroom as soon as he entered police headquarters. There wasn’t anybody around at the moment except Kendall Hoyt who sat behind a flat-topped desk cleaning his gun. Mitch felt a little peculiar about disturbing him. It was almost like interrupting a man at worship.

  “Is Ernie in?” he finally asked, nodding at the frosted-glass panel.

  One surly glance was all Hoyt could spare. “He’s in, but he’s busy.”

  “With Mrs. Wales?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Anything new on her missing husband?”

  Hoyt shoved a handful of wheat-colored hair out of his eyes and gave the gun a momentary rest. “How should I know?” he muttered. “I’m only patrolling this damn desk. I wanted to go out looking for the guy myself but Ernie says no, so here I sit.”

  “Maybe Ernie wants to take Wales alive,” Mitch said.

  And maybe some day, if he lived that long, Mitch Gorman would learn not to say the first thing that popped into his head. Hoyt was a sensitive man about some matters, and intimating that he might be a little fast on the draw wasn’t going to encourage co-operation insofar as seeing Ernie was concerned. But Mitch still had his own leg power.

  “Hey, you can’t go in there!” Hoyt yelled, but he was wrong, Mitch was already putting Ernie’s door between himself and what could have become a difficult situation. Not that Ernie couldn’t be difficult on occasion, but even in his darkest moods he looked more like an overwrought Kewpie than a tower of wrath.

  But Ernie wasn’t in a dark mood at all. Mitch saw that the moment he stepped into the office. His bloodshot eyes were complaining about all that lost sleep, and the seersucker was a lot more wrinkled and sweat-patched than it had been at dawn, but Ernie was wearing a drowsy smile as he rocked back in his wide leather chair and nodded Mitch in.

  “I’ve been wondering how long it would take you to show up,” he remarked. “Come on in. I feel very friendly toward the press today.”

  Mitch cringed. In a chair opposite Ernie’s desk sat a woman, and her head came up at those words and impaled him with a stare that suggested he’d just walked in with an advanced case of leprosy. Mrs. Wales wouldn’t be sharing that friendly feeling toward the press, that was for sure, and she wouldn’t smile and accept that hand Mitch extended at Ernie’s explanatory introduction. It just hung there, foolish and empty like all his preconceived ideas of Frank Wales’s wife.

  He’d been going by a photograph dated 1936. He’d added all the intervening years and then mated Wales to a faded, drab little woman with tear-stained eyes and worried hands. He’d worked up quite a bit of sympathy for this poor soul who had been tricked into placing the finger of suspicion on her husband; but the woman Ernie introduced as Norma Wales wasn’t faded and drab, and if she’d shed any tears they weren’t showing for indignation. Her eyes were clear and unfaltering, and the hand she wouldn’t extend was steady. She couldn’t have been over twenty-five, unless somebody was bottling the fountain of youth, and at a time like this all Mitch could think of was the wonder that a man like Frank Wales could get himself not one but two attractive wives.

  But the present Mrs. Wales wasn’t at all like Virginia. She was small and dark, with a close-cropped cap of hair that was the same shade of brown at the roots as at the ends, and if she had a smile it wasn’t showing now.

  “I don’t want to talk to any more newspapermen,” she announced firmly. “I talked to one this morning and he’s a liar!”

  Mitch could have said much worse about Peter himself, but this was no time to encourage libel. “That’s a pretty strong accusation,” he protested. “Didn’t you tell Mr. Delafield that you came to Valley City in search of your husband?”

  Mrs. Wales hesitated. “I didn’t say that he was here. I just thought he might have come here.”

  “Why? Did he tell you he was coming here?”

  Questions like that weren’t going to win Norma Wales’s friendship, and that was a shame, but Ernie had the answers to fill up the silent spaces. “I’ll tell you why,” he volunteered. “Frank Wales received a special-delivery letter from his ex-wife the night before he left home. He paced the floor all night and then took off in the station wagon next morning without saying where he was going. It’s taken several hours for Mrs. Wales to admit that much, but she did finally.”

  “What was in the letter?” Mitch wanted to know.

  “She doesn’t know—she says.”

  Norma Wales’s eyes came up blazing. “I don’t know! I’m not in the habit of reading my husband’s mail!”

  “Then how does anybody know it was from Virginia Wales?” Mitch asked.

  “I saw the postmark. My husband doesn’t know anybody else in Valley City.”

  “And nobody else in Valley City has been murdered,” Ernie said dryly. “Oh, mind, now, I’m not accusing your husband of killing the woman. I just think it might be interesting to find him and have a little chat.”

  No wonder Ernie looked so happy. Now that he was recovering from the initial shock of this unexpected Mrs. Wales, Mitch could see a lot more in her face than just righteous indignation. She was putting up a front. A big, brave front, and Ernie must know it. No woman would chase her husband halfway across the state just because he left home without giving her money for the milkman. And then it occurred to him that her story might be worth listening to if he could talk his way out of Delafield’s doghouse.

  “What about that ripped screen?” he demanded suddenly. “If Wales came to see his ex-wife in response to a letter he’d have gone to the door instead of a window. Why, for all we know he may be off on a fishing-trip and doesn’t even know there’s been a murder!”

  It was such a noble try, but nothing happened. No bright lights came up in Norma Wales’s eyes; no smile of gratitude or trace of hope. The only smile in the room belonged to Ernie and i
t wasn’t encouraging.

  “I asked the landlady about that screen after you left this morning,” he said. “She says it’s been like that for months.”

  “But even so—”

  “But even so—what? Look, Mitchell, this is the story. Mr. and Mrs. Wales operate a small motel up on the Redwood Highway. That’s work. With a deal like that you don’t just pick up and go fishing when the busy season’s getting under way. Item two: a station operator in Indio reports gassing up Wales’s station wagon last night about ten-thirty. He was heading this way at the time. Item three: somewhere around midnight, so far as we can tell, Virginia suddenly stopped living. Item four: where is Mrs. Wales’s missing husband?”

  “All right!” Mitch interrupted. “All right! Save it for the district attorney!”

  Ernie Talbot wasn’t a cruel man. He had a messy murder on his hands and now, unexpectedly, he had a first-class suspect. The combination got him a bit excited, but every statement he made had registered like a slap on Norma Wales’s face. Maybe she wasn’t a faded drab, but she was a woman with troubles and either one of the two was enough to arouse Mitch’s interest. She was a woman with troubles that were just beginning, and one glance at her naked eyes was enough to tell him that she knew that as well as anyone in the room and maybe a lot better. She needed rest and sleep and at least a little hope. But all she got was Ernie’s final blow.

  “In any event,” he said, shoving the big chair back from the desk, “we won’t be in doubt long. That dance trophy we found by the body is alive with fingerprints.”

  As Ernie had said, that was the story. A few minutes later Mitch was back on the sidewalk where the length of the shadows had begun to suggest that the day might end sometime, and where pedestrians were working up enough interest to hesitate when they passed headquarters and show curious faces. Valley City was going to have a man hunt, a great, wide, man hunt that would alert the border guards, send the sedans of the highway patrol nosing about the roads and byways like so many hunting dogs, and clutter up the air waves with intense and earnest voices. By nightfall everybody in the valley would know enough to bolt the doors, because a desperate killer was at large. A middle-aged, heavy-set man with a receding hairline, a weak mouth, and a pair of sad eyes. You could read all about it on the front page of the papers the delivery boys were tossing on doorsteps all over town.