She was sitting by a window looking out on a countryside where red sumac blazed among less brilliant colors. Her hair was white, and bobbed short. Her blue silk suit looked like Lily Daché. Her face was a mass of wrinkles but its fine bones remained in all their delicacy. She was handsome in the way an antique object can be handsome without regard to the condition of the materials. Her mind must have been very deep in the past, because she didn’t notice us until the maid spoke.
“Mr. Archer is here, Mrs. Deloney.”
She rose with the ease of a younger woman, putting down a book she was holding. She gave me her hand and a long look. Her eyes were the same color as her blue silk suit, unfaded and intelligent.
“So you’ve come all the way from California to see me. You must be disappointed.”
“On the contrary.”
“You don’t need to flatter me. When I was twenty I looked like everybody else. Now I’m past seventy, I look like myself. It’s a liberating fact. But do sit down. This chair is the most comfortable. My father Senator Osborne preferred it to any other.”
She indicated a red leather armchair polished and dark with use. The chair she sat in opposite me was a ladderbacked rocker with worn cushions attached to it. The rest of the furnishings in the room were equally old and unpretentious, and I wondered if she used it as a place to keep the past.
“You’ve had a journey,” she reminded herself. “Can I give you something to eat or drink?”
“No thanks.”
She dismissed the maid. “I’m afraid you’re going to be doubly disappointed. I can add very little to the official account of my husband’s suicide. Luke and I hadn’t been in close touch for some time before it occurred.”
“You already have added something,” I said. “According to the official account it was an accident.”
“So it was. I’d almost forgotten. It was thought best to omit the fact of suicide from the public reports.”
“Who thought it best?”
“I did, among others. Given my late husband’s position in the state, his suicide was bound to have business and political repercussions. Not to mention the personal ugliness.”
“Some people might think it was uglier to alter the facts of a man’s death.”
“Some people might think it,” she said with a grande dame expression. “Not many of them would say it in my presence. In any case the fact was not altered, only the report of it. I’ve had to live with the fact of my husband’s suicide.”
“Are you perfectly certain that it is a fact?”
“Perfectly.”
“I’ve just been talking to the man who handled the case, Lieutenant Hoffman. He says your husband shot himself by accident while he was cleaning an automatic pistol.”
“That was the story we agreed upon. Lieutenant Hoffman naturally sticks to it. I see no point in your trying to change it at this late date.”
“Unless Mr. Deloney was murdered. Then there would be some point.”
“No doubt, but he was not murdered.” Her eyes came up to mine, and they hadn’t changed, except that they may have become a little harder.
“I’ve heard rumors that he was, as far away as California.”
“Who’s been spreading such nonsense?”
“Lieutenant Hoffman’s daughter Helen. She claimed she knew a witness to the killing. The witness may have been herself.”
The insecurity that had touched her face changed into cold anger. “She has no right to tell such lies. I’ll have her stopped!”
“She’s been stopped,” I said. “Somebody stopped her Friday night, with a gun. Which is why I’m here.”
“I see. Where in California was she killed?”
“Pacific Point. It’s on the coast south of Los Angeles.”
Her eyes flinched, ever so slightly. “I’m afraid I never heard of it. I’m naturally sorry that the girl is dead, though I never knew her. But I can assure you that her death had nothing to do with Luke. You’re barking up the wrong tree, Mr. Archer.”
“I wonder.”
“There’s no need to. My husband wrote me a note before he shot himself which made the whole thing very clear. Detective Hoffman brought it to me himself. No one knew it existed except him and his superiors. I hadn’t intended to tell you.”
“Why?”
“Because it was ugly. In effect he blamed me and my family for what he intended to do. He was in financial hot water, he’d been gambling in stocks and other things, his business was overextended. We refused to help him, for reasons both personal and practical. His suicide was an attempt to strike back at us. It succeeded, even though we altered the facts, as you put it.” She touched her flat chest. “I was hurt, as I was meant to be.”
“Was Senator Osborne alive at the time?”
“I’m afraid you don’t know your history,” she chided me. “My father died on December 14, 1936, three-and-a-half years before my husband killed himself. At least my father was spared that humiliation.”
“You referred to family.”
“I meant my sister Tish and my late Uncle Scott, the guardian of our trust. He and I were responsible for refusing further assistance to Luke. The decision was essentially mine. Our marriage had ended.”
“Why?”
“The usual reason, I believe. I don’t care to discuss it” She rose and went to the window and stood there straight as a soldier looking out. “A number of things ended for me in 1940. My marriage, and then my husband’s life, and then my sister’s. Tish died in the summer of that same year, and I cried for her all that fall. And now it’s fall again,” she said with a sigh. “We used to ride together in the fall. I taught her to ride when she was five years old and I was ten. That was before the turn of the century.”
Her mind was wandering off into remoter and less painful times. I said:
“Forgive me for laboring the point, Mrs. Deloney, but I have to ask you if that suicide note still exists.”
She turned, trying to smooth the marks of grief from her face. They persisted. Of course not. I burned it. You can take my word as to its contents.”
“It isn’t your word that concerns me so much. Are you absolutely certain your husband wrote it?”
“Yes. I couldn’t be mistaken about his handwriting.”
“A clever forgery can fool almost anybody.”
“That’s absurd. You’re talking the language of melodrama.”
“We live it every day, Mrs. Deloney.”
“But who would forge a suicide note?”
“It’s been done, by other murderers.”
She flung back her white head and looked at me down her delicate curved nose. She resembled a bird, even in the sound of her voice:
“My husband was not murdered.”
“It seems to me you’re resting a great deal of weight on a single handwritten note which might have been forged.”
“It was not forged. I know that by internal evidence. It referred to matters that only Luke and I were privy to.”
“Such as?”
“I have no intention of telling you, or anyone. Besides, Luke had been talking for months about killing himself, especially when he was in his cups.”
“You said you hadn’t been close to him for months.”
“No, but I got reports, from mutual friends.”
“Was Hoffman one of them?”
“Hardly. I didn’t consider him a friend.”
“Yet he hushed up your husband’s suicide for you. Your husband’s alleged suicide.”
“He was ordered to. He had no choice.”
“Who gave the order?”
“Presumably the Commissioner of Police. He was a friend of mine, and a friend of Luke’s.”
“And that made it all right for him to order the falsification of records?”
“It’s done every day,” she said, “in every city in the land. Spare me your moralizing, Mr. Archer. Commissioner Robertson is long since dead. The case itself is a dead issue.”
“Maybe it is to you. It’s very much on Hoffman’s mind. His daughter’s murder revived it.”
“I’m sorry for both of them. But I can’t very well alter the past to accommodate some theory you may have. What are you trying to prove, Mr. Archer?”
“Nothing specific. I’m trying to find out what the dead woman meant when she said that Bridgeton had caught up with her.”
“No doubt she meant something quite private and personal. Women usually do. But as I said, I never knew Helen Hoffman.”
“Was she involved with your husband?”
“No. She was not. And please don’t ask me how I can be sure. We’ve scratched enough at Luke’s grave, don’t you think? There’s nothing hidden there but a poor suicide. I helped to put him there, in a way.”
“By cutting off his funds?”
“Precisely. You didn’t think I was confessing to shooting him?”
“No,” I said. “Would you like to?”
Her face crinkled up in a rather savage smile. “Very well. I shot him. What do you propose to do about it?”
“Nothing. I don’t believe you.”
“Why would I say it if it wasn’t true?” She was playing the kind of fantastic girlish game old women sometimes revert to.
“Maybe you wanted to shoot your husband. I have no doubt you did want to. But if you actually had, you wouldn’t be talking about it.”
“Why not? There’s nothing you could possibly do. I have too many good friends in this city, official and otherwise. Who incidentally would be greatly disturbed if you persisted in stirring up that old mess.”
“Am I to take that as a threat?”
“No, Mr. Archer,” she said with her tight smile, “I have nothing against you except that you’re a zealot in your trade, or do you call it a profession? Does it really matter so much how people died? They’re dead, as we all shall be, sooner or later. Some of us sooner. And I feel I’ve given you enough of my remaining time on earth.”
She rang for the maid.
chapter 22
I STILL HAD TIME for another try at Earl Hoffman. I drove back toward his house, through downtown streets depopulated by the Sabbath. The questions Mrs. Deloney had raised, or failed to answer, stuck in my mind like fishhooks which trailed their broken lines into the past.
I was almost certain Deloney hadn’t killed himself, by accident or intent. I was almost certain somebody else had, and that Mrs. Deloney knew it. As for the suicide note, it could have been forged, it could have been invented, it could have been misread or misremembered. Hoffman would probably know which.
As I turned into Cherry Street, I saw a man in the next block walking away from me. He had on a blue suit and he moved with the heavy forcefulness of an old cop, except that every now and then he staggered and caught himself. I saw when I got closer that it was Hoffman. The orange cuffs of his pajama legs hung below his blue trousers.
I let him stay ahead of me, through slums that became more blighted as we went south. We entered a Negro district. The adult men and women on the sidewalk gave Hoffman a wide berth. He was walking trouble.
He wasn’t walking too well. He stumbled and fell on his hands and knees by a gap-toothed picket fence. Some children came out from behind the fence and followed him, prancing and hooting, until he turned on them with upraised arms. He turned again and went on.
We left the Negro district and came to a district of very old three-storied frame houses converted into rooming houses and business buildings. A few newer apartment buildings stood among them, and Hoffman’s destination was one of these.
It was a six-story concrete structure with a slightly rundown aspect: cracked and yellowing blinds in the rows of windows, brown watermarks below them. Hoffman went in the front entrance. I could see the inscription in the concrete arch above it: Deloney Apartments, 1928. I parked my car and followed Hoffman into the building.
He had evidently taken the elevator up. The tarnished brass arrow above the elevator door slowly turned clockwise to seven and stuck there. I gave up pushing the button after a while—Hoffman had probably left the door ajar—and found the fire stairs. I was breathing hard by the time I reached the metal door that let out onto the roof.
I opened the door a crack. Except for some pigeons coo-hooing on a neighboring rooftop, everything outside seemed very quiet. A few potted shrubs and a green plexiglass windscreen jutting out at right angles from the wall of the penthouse had converted a corner of the roof into a terrace.
A man and a woman were sunning themselves there. She was lying face down on an air mattress with the brassière of her Bikini unfastened. She was blonde and nicely made. He sat in a deck chair, with a half-empty cola bottle on the table beside him. He was broad and dark, with coarse black hair matting his chest and shoulders. He wore a diamond ring on the little finger of his left hand, and had a faint Greek accent.
“So you think the restaurant business is low class? When you say that you’re biting the hand that feeds you. The restaurant business put mink on your back.”
“I didn’t say it. What I said, the insurance business is a nice clean business for a man.”
“And restaurants are dirty? Not my restaurants. I even got violet rays in the toilets—”
“Don’t talk filthy,” she said.
“Toilet is not a filthy word.”
“It is in my family.”
“I’m sick of hearing about your family. I’m sick of hearing about your good-for-nothing brother Theo.”
“Good-for-nothing?” She sat up, exposing a pearly flash of breast before she fastened its moorings. “Theo made the Million Dollar Magic Circle last year.”
“Who bought the policy that put him over the top? I did. Who set him up in the insurance agency in the first place? I did.”
“Mr. God.” Her face was a beautiful blank mask. It didn’t change when she said: “Who’s that moving around in the house? I sent Rosie home after breakfast.”
“She came back maybe.”
“It doesn’t sound like Rosie. It sounds like a man.”
“Could be Theo coming to sell me this year’s Magic Circle policy.”
“That isn’t funny.”
“I think it’s very funny.”
He laughed to prove it. He stopped laughing when Earl Hoffman came out from behind the plexiglass windscreen. Every mark on his face was distinct in the sunlight. His orange pajamas were down over his shoes.
The dark man got out of his deck chair and pushed air toward Hoffman with his hands. “Beat it. This is a private roof.”
“I can’t do that,” Hoffman said reasonably. “We got a report of a dead body. Where is it?”
“Down in the basement. You’ll find it there.” The man winked at the woman.
“The basement? They said the penthouse.” Hoffman’s damaged mouth opened and shut mechanically, like a dummy’s, as if the past was ventriloquizing through him. “You moved it, eh? It’s against the law to move it.”
“You move yourself out of here.” The man turned to the woman, who had covered herself with a yellow terrycloth robe: “Go in and phone the you-know-who.”
“I am the you-know-who,” Hoffman said. “And the woman stays. I have some questions to ask her. What’s your name?”
“None of your business,” she said.
“Everything’s my business.” Hoffman flung one arm out and almost lost his balance. “I’m detective inves’gating murder.”
“Let’s see your badge, detective.”
The man held out his hand, but he didn’t move toward Hoffman. Neither of them had moved. The woman was on her knees, with her beautiful scared face slanting up at Hoffman.
He fumbled in his clothes, produced a fifty-cent piece, looked at it in a frustrated way, and flung it spinning over the parapet. Faintly, I heard it ring on the pavement six stories down.
“Must of left it home,” he said mildly.
The woman gathered herself together and made a dash for th
e penthouse. Moving clumsily and swiftly, Hoffman caught her around the waist. She didn’t struggle, but stood stiff and white-faced in the circle of his arm.
“Not so fast now, baby. Got some questions to ask you. You the broad that’s been sleeping with Deloney?”
She said to the man: “Are you going to let him talk to me this way? Tell him to take his hands off me.”
“Take your hands off my wife,” the man said without force.
“Then tell her to sit down and cooperate.”
“Sit down and cooperate,” the man said.
“Are you crazy? He smells like a still. He’s crazy drunk.”
“I know that.”
“Then do something.”
“I am doing something. You got to humor them.”
Hoffman smiled at him like a public servant who was used to weathering unjust criticism. His hurt mouth and mind made the smile grotesque. The woman tried to pull away from him. He only held her closer, his belly nudging her flank.
“You look a little bit like my dau’er Helen. You know my dau’er Helen?”
The woman shook her head frantically. Her hair fluffed out.
“She says there was a witness to the killing. Were you there when it happened, baby?”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do. Luke Deloney. Somebody drilled him in the eye and tried to make it look like suicide.”
“I remember Deloney,” the man said. “I waited on him in my father’s hamburg joint once or twice. He died before the war.
“Before the war?”
“That’s what I said. Where you been the last twenty years, detective?”
Hoffman didn’t know. He looked around at the rooftops of his city as if it was a strange place. The woman cried out:
“Let me go, fatso.”
He seemed to hear her from a long way off. “You speak with some respect to your old man.”
“If you were my old man I’d kill myself.”
“Don’t give me no more of your lip. I’ve had as much of your lip as I’m going to take. You hear me?”
“Yes I hear you. You’re a crazy old man and take your filthy paws off me.”
The Chill Page 18