Obit Delayed

by Nielsen, Helen

  “Was it that bad?”

  “It wasn’t bad at all. It was just—well, just no marriage. Virginia was very young and Frank was very poor. He did all the working and she did all the playing. The war finished off whatever little was left between them by that time. Does that sound like the making of a triangle, Mr. Gorman?”

  A question like that wasn’t to be answered on the spur of the moment. Mitch finished his drink and mulled it over. Norma Wales had still left a lot of things unsaid, but part of her argument made sense. That dance trophy still didn’t fit with the groom on that wedding picture, and Virginia’s feet would have danced away from him as naturally as water running downhill. In all these years they could have danced a long way and in all kinds of company. That music blaring in the next room, for instance—they could have danced to that. It was expensive music for a waitress from a downtown hash house, but there were plenty of wallets fat enough to pay the piper.

  “Mrs. Wales,” he demanded suddenly, “does your husband know a man named Dave Singer?”

  He could see the name was new to her. Her negative was just the way it had to be.

  “And there was really just that one trip to Valley City?”

  “Just the one,” she nodded, “but I don’t see—”

  But Mitch didn’t have time to explain now. They were sitting in a back booth far enough from the bar not to be seen, and the boy Mitch had just spotted wasn’t in much of a condition to see well anyway. He couldn’t very well miss Dave Singer, not in that Scotch plaid dinner jacket that must carry a Hollywood tailor’s label. As if that wasn’t decoration enough, he was wearing on his arm a Swedish blonde (Swedish only because it was fashionable this season) who was just barely wearing a black sequined gown. Both of them were doing a fair job of holding up the bar when Mitch left Norma staring into her Martini and cut in.

  There were smarter tactics than trying to beard Dave in his own habitat, but all that intimate conversation about Frank Wales’s love life had only served to increase Mitch’s curiosity. He nudged the full-bodied blonde aside—not an easy task—and met Dave’s glassy glare with his very best public-relations smile.

  “Well, if it isn’t the newsboy!” Dave said, once he’d managed to get Mitch into focus. “What’s on your mind, Gorman? Has my subscription run out?” “Not yet,” Mitch answered, “but it happens. It happened to a friend of yours last night.”

  “I don’t have any friends!”

  Drunk or sober, Dave was careful. That was a must for anybody in Costro’s palace guard.

  “Sure you do,” Mitch reminded. “You have lots of friends—take Rita, for instance. That is the name, isn’t it? I seem to remember it from some police blotter.” (He could roast in hell for that remark, the blonde’s eyes said. But it backed her up so he could close in on Dave.) “And then there was poor Virginia Wales. You remember Sunshine, don’t you? I don’t blame you for drowning your grief after what happened to her.”

  “Never heard of her,” Dave muttered.

  “And you never heard of Pinky’s Quick Lunch, either, I suppose.”

  “Why should I? I never eat lunch!”

  Mitch nodded thoughtfully. “That’s what I mean,” he said. “Why should Dave Singer, of all people, come into a cheap hash house like Pinky’s and get all excited and blow his top over the dirty so-and-so who killed the pretty waitress? No matter how hard it hit you, Dave, a man of your experience should know better than to open his mouth so wide.”

  Not until he stopped talking did Mitch realize how much he should have taken his own advice. The bar was suddenly quiet. In the next room the band still blared and the couples still shuffled across the floor; but at the bar everybody seemed to have stopped breathing. Everybody but Dave Singer.

  “You lousy, lying bastard!” he screamed, and unloaded a wild right at Mitch’s jaw. He was off balance and the blow fell short, but it was enough to send Mitch sprawling back against the blonde, who was well padded but not too friendly to uninvited guests.

  “Wait a minute!” he yelled, but by the time Rita got through throwing rabbit punches Dave was no longer in sight. That condition was becoming habitual.

  When Mitch finally got back to his apartment, and that long-postponed engagement with the inner springs, he was a sadder and wiser man. Wiser because all that evasion must add up to something Frank Wales didn’t figure in, and sadder because reaching the total would probably mean bothering some very unpleasant people.

  But he did have one nice thought to dream on. The scuffle at the bar had meant telling Norma Wales all about the incident at Pinky’s, and if her excitement was a little too great, even if her hopes had soared too high for safety, she had said good night in an awfully friendly tone.

  5

  AND THEN, as the Good Book says, the evening and the morning were the second day.

  Another sun swung up over the valley. Another shift took up the search for the missing man, but not all the false reports, wild rumors, or even the dramatic prose of the morning newscaster could shed any light on the whereabouts of Frank Wales and his old station wagon. It was as if he’d been swallowed up by the desert. The roads were long and reached to faraway places—the mountains, the sea, and old Mexico not an hour’s drive away. There were many hiding-places if a man knew where to find them.

  Meantime, there had to be an inquest. The story was rightfully Peter’s, but a chance remark and a short right cross had given Mitch enough curiosity to warrant a back seat on the proceedings. He arrived just as Kendall Hoyt was telling his story.

  “… So when the complaint came in,” he was saying, “I drove over to see what the fuss was all about and found this pup yowling on the doorstep. The landlady—she lives right next door—came to meet me and said the pup belonged inside, all right, but nobody seemed to be at home.”

  All that expensive air conditioning the taxpayers had bought wasn’t quite as advertised. Hoyt had to stop and mop his high forehead with a wad of linen.

  “I was going to take the dog to the pound when I noticed light showing under the bedroom-window blind. It was beginning to get light. That’s why I didn’t see it right off. I didn’t like the looks of that and asked the landlady for a passkey, but the door was unlocked. The dog led me straight to the bedroom.” Hoyt paused again and every eye in the place was focused on that brown-smudged trophy on a table in the front of the chamber. “The deceased was sprawled across the bed. I saw right away that she was dead.”

  Yes, anybody would have seen right away that she was dead. The whole picture came back to Mitch like a case of delayed nausea, and by the time he threw it off Hoyt’s story was over.

  “Callers? Her? Of course she had callers, almost every night. What do you expect with a pretty girl like that?”

  The statement brought Mitch back from the place his mind had wandered. A fat, florid woman with graying hair and a gold-toothed smile was testifying. Mrs. Molina, the landlady.

  “I asked her one time if she didn’t get tired chasing around so much,” she added, “but she only laughed and said, ‘Mamma,’—that’s what she always called me, Mamma Molina—’there’ll be time enough to rest when I’m old. Time enough to stay home when I’m old and ugly.’” Mrs. Molina paused and dabbed her eyes with a bright handkerchief. “She was always so happy. Like a child, almost.”

  The spectators might be interested in what Mrs. Molina thought of her late tenant, but the evidence was meager. She had callers and she went out nights, but not on the night of her death.

  “Sunday night I didn’t see anybody come,” the woman told them. “I heard the radio playing until I went to bed—after, I guess. Radios playing don’t keep me awake, but howling dogs!” Mrs. Molina rolled her dark eyes toward the ceiling. “Howling dogs is the sign of death!”

  After Mrs. Molina, the dry statistics of the autopsy report were quite a letdown. Ernie had already revealed that Virginia had died sometime near midnight, and that gave Frank Wales plenty of time to drive down from a serv
ice station in Indio. That was the only important thing, and everybody in the room knew it. Frank Wales had been accused, tried, and found guilty, all by virtue of his unaccountable absence, and the only man present who doubted the justice of that verdict was deep in a conjuring act. Virginia Wales, just a kid who never grew up. That’s the picture Frank Wales had given his new wife (one she was trying desperately to believe even if she wouldn’t admit it), and now Mrs. Molina had come along and given the story a boost. Put these things together with a personal memory and a dance trophy tagged Exhibit A, and strange thoughts began to intrude on Mitch’s effort to follow the testimony. Pinky was telling his story now, painfully stubborn under questioning, but Mitch had heard it all before.

  Strange thoughts. Virginia, at thirty-odd, had come a long way from the nursery. Frank Wales’s alleged paternal instinct might not make much sense when considered in that light; but making sense wasn’t too common among mortals, and Wales was as mortal as the next man. Or was he?

  A new thought hit Mitch like an ice-cold shower. For the next few minutes he wouldn’t hear anything said in that chamber, because he’d just realized an alternative to guilt in Frank Wales’s absence.

  It was roughly twenty-four hours since the alarm went out for a man and a station wagon. Twenty-four hours of radiocasts, telecast descriptions, and a police dragnet reaching far beyond the state borders. To drive his car Wales would need gas, and no station reported servicing his car since that Sunday night stop at Indio. To walk he would need food and water, and nobody had sold food or drink to this man with the well-advertised face. There was no doubt that Wales could have completed that drive in from Indio in time to kill his ex-wife, but suppose, and this was the idea that made the inquest swim out of focus and the testimony seem empty and foolish—suppose he’d completed the trip in time to witness her murder? Suppose Frank Wales had walked in on that bloody scene? An accident like that would never be covered by any insurance company.

  So Pinky could go on answering questions about Virginia’s state of mind that last day of her life. He could go on denying that she seemed nervous or strange; he could repeat that he didn’t know anything about her plans for the evening and that he only paid her wages, he didn’t hear her confession. He seemed to like that phrase. He used it again twice. He could even recite his business troubles, but not for Mitch Gorman’s ears. The inquest was all Peter’s now. This was no place to find a murderer.

  Once upon a time there had been a housing shortage in Valley City, and then the war was over and some public-spirited citizens built a lot of elegant apartments that no workingman could afford unless his job ran forty hours a day. But Dave Singer seemed to have no trouble paying his rent, because there was his name spelled out on the little card over the doorbell. About the time Mitch’s finger was growing to the button, the door opened a few inches and a slice of face peered at him through the aperture. It wasn’t Dave. Even a partial view was enough to reveal that this boy could make two of Dave standing abreast.

  “I didn’t know Dave had a butler,” Mitch said.

  From the doorway came nothing; just that one cold, staring eye.

  “I’d like to talk to him if he’s around.”

  “What about?”

  “That’s what I’ll tell Dave.”

  The door opened a bit wider, and Mitch recognized an old fraternity brother of Dave’s, San Quentin, class of ‘49. Herbie Boyle didn’t have Dave’s looks or style, but the width of his shoulders didn’t come from a tailor.

  “Dave ain’t here,” he growled.

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “And you don’t know where he went, do you, Herbie?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sure,” Mitch nodded, “that’s exactly right. That’s just what I had in mind. And you don’t know anything about Virginia Wales, either.”

  Conversation with Herbie wouldn’t be sparkling under the best of circumstances, but now it came to a full halt. He just stared at Mitch a few seconds longer and then slammed the door in his face.

  There was always the possibility that Herbie had been telling the truth. Dave didn’t have to be at home. Minus neons the Club Serape was just a lot of faded-green stucco without windows, but only if you didn’t know about Vince Costro and his enterprises. Costro was a very enterprising fellow, sort of a Horatio Alger with modern alterations, and it was difficult to imagine that Dave could ever be anywhere that Costro didn’t know about.

  It was like walking into a pocket to come in out of the sunshine, except that this pocket had a hole in it where a few dim lights outlined the bar. Making his way toward the lights Mitch picked up some knife-and-fork noises and the tag end of the noonday news from some radio he couldn’t see. And then somebody switched off the radio and said, “Had lunch, Mr. Gorman?”

  By this time Mitch could make out a few shadows and shapes, and finally the big man who sat on the end stool of the bar. There was nothing formal about Vince Costro. If he wanted to eat at the bar, he ate at the bar. Just now he was tearing into a salad big enough for a ladies’ canasta club and washing it down with a quart of milk.

  “I’ve got a French chef in the kitchen that costs me like blackmail,” he explained between mouthfuls, “but he turns out the best salad you ever ate. Have some?”

  “Thanks,” Mitch said, “but I’m not hungry.”

  “Thirsty, then? The bartender ain’t come on duty yet, but I can mix up anything you want. Used to be a bartender myself you know, but I never touch the stuff now. It’s murder on my stomach.”

  Vince Costro, the genial host. The back slapper, the glad-hander, the man with the ready checkbook for charity drives, benefits, and certain campaign funds. Mitch knew all about Vince Costro and looked the other way. But now he waited for him to wipe off the milk mustache from his rugged face and then tried a question just for response.

  “Where’s Dave Singer?” he asked.

  Vince patted his mouth with the napkin and grew thoughtful. “Dave Singer—” he repeated.

  “You remember Dave—your social secretary.”

  That brought a laugh from Vince’s beltline. “I was only trying to remember,” he explained. “Dave said something about going to Vegas—or was it Tahoe? With Dave you never know. He likes to travel.”

  “For his health?” Mitch suggested.

  Even without looking he could feel Vince’s heavy eyebrows drawing together and his smile tightening up. “I think you’re making a big thing out of nothing,” he answered. “Take it easy, Mr. Gorman. It’s too hot to be getting your blood pressure up.”

  “Then you know why I’m looking for Dave.”

  “I heard about what happened here last night. That’s the trouble with this business, you’ve always got trouble with drunks.”

  “Meaning me?”

  “You?” Vince’s laugh came back again. “I wasn’t thinking about you, only Dave. Dave was in a bad way.”

  “So he went to Vegas to sober up.”

  “Or Tahoe. I’m not sure which.”

  “Or maybe he went to Carmel to do some water colors. What’s he running for, Vince?”

  Vince had resumed work on that salad bowl, and it required his full attention for several minutes. When he looked up again Mitch was still standing beside the bar waiting for an answer.

  “It’s a funny thing,” Vince mused, “how people sometimes get peculiar ideas. Take me, for instance. I always figured doing something important like running a newspaper would take a lot of time. Don’t let me keep you from your work.”

  “You aren’t,” Mitch said.

  “It must be pretty exciting at that. Big stories breaking, like this Wales fellow killing his ex-wife and hiding out. Crazy thing to do, wasn’t it? But some guys are like that. A woman gets under his skin and he can’t forget about her. But I guess that side of the business doesn’t interest you so much, does it? You’ve got to consider the practical angles, like boosting circul
ation and getting more advertising.”

  The blow was coming and Mitch didn’t even have time to duck.

  “Come to think of it,” Vince said slowly, “I’ve been wanting to see you about that very thing. I’ve got a couple of new acts coming in next month. Maybe you could work up something special in the way of publicity. You know, good taste and not too inexpensive.”

  “How about a full-page spread?” Mitch suggested.

  “You name it. You’re the idea man.”

  The payoff was a little subtle for Costro’s style, but Mitch understood. There was nothing like freedom of the press.

  If Mitch had been a good boy he’d have taken Costro’s left-handed advice and gone back to the office to write an editorial on creeping socialism; but Mitch had a weakness. He didn’t mind being stepped on; it was grinding the heel that hurt. And if Dave Singer’s slip of the tongue concerned the big brass to the extent of ringing down the iron curtain, it concerned Mitch enough to look a little farther. At the nearest gas station he pulled in and used the phone. The Duchess answered, her mouth full of lunch and her voice full of sarcasm.

  “How sweet of you to call,” she cooed over the wire. “It’s so nice to be remembered now and then.”

  “Oh, I think of you children often,” Mitch answered, “but just now I’m looking for a woman. Rita something—Royale, I think. She figured in a vice raid not long ago. We carried the story.”

  “Well, good for us! What about her?”

  “I want her address. Pry yourself out of my chair and start hunting, honey. The exercise will be good for your hips.”

  After that Mitch let the receiver dangle for a few minutes. It was warm enough without the character analysis The Duchess would deliver before going to work on the files.

  Rita’s diggings didn’t belong in the same world as Dave’s. The apartment building had been constructed in an era when sunlight was just nasty stuff that faded the carpets, and iron grillwork was the latest thing in decorative elegance. Mitch groped his way down a hall that resembled a deserted subway station and was wearing out his knuckles on the door before anything began to stir.