“I told Leo he was nuts. He said the reason he was a success was because he looked years ahead. He had a use for Cervantes, he said, and he knew he could trust him, after the Fablon business. That was one time he was wrong. As soon as Leo got sick this last time, Cervantes turned on him.” Her voice deepened. “It’s funny about Leo. Everybody was afraid of him, including me. He was the big shot. But as soon as he got really sick, he was just a nothing man. A flunky like Cervantes could take him for everything he had.”
“At least it was a switch. How did Cervantes get hold of the money?”
“Leo turned it over to him, a piece at a time, over the last three-four years. Cervantes got some kind of a government job, and he could cross the border without being searched. He stashed the money someplace out of the country, maybe in Switzerland, in one of those numbered bank accounts they have.”
I didn’t think the money was in Switzerland. There were numbered bank accounts in Panama, too.
“What are you thinking?”
“I was wondering,” I said, “if Mrs. Fablon was blackmailing Leo for killing her husband.”
“She was. She came to see him in Vegas after the body was found. She told him she protected him at the inquest, and the least he could do was help her out a little. He hated like hell to do it, but I think he sent her payments from then on.” She paused, and looked at me sharply. “I’ve told you everything I know about the Fablons. Are you going to try and trace that money for me?”
“I’m not saying no. Right now I have another client, and two other murders to work on.”
“There’s no money in that, is there?”
“Money isn’t the only thing in life.”
“That’s what I used to think, until this. What are you, a do-gooder or something?”
“I wouldn’t say so. I’m working at not being a do-badder.”
She gave me a puzzled look. “I don’t get you, Archer. What’s your angle?”
“I like people, and I try to be of some service.”
“And that adds up to a life?”
“It makes life possible, anyway. Try it some time.”
“I did,” she said, “with Harry. But he didn’t have what it takes. I always get stuck with feebs and cripples.” She shrugged. “I better see how Leo is doing.”
He was waiting patiently in the cross-hatched shadow of a latticework screen. His shirt and trousers were loose on his shrunken body. He blinked up at me when we approached him, as if I planned to hit him.
“Cowardy custard,” Kitty said cheerfully. “This is my new boyfriend. He’s going to find the money and take me on a trip around the world. And you want to know what’s going to happen to you, you poor old clown? We’ll put you in a ward in the county hospital. And nobody will ever come to see you.”
I walked out.
chapter 30
I DROVE BACK to Los Angeles, stopped there for dinner during the twilight hour, and finished the trip to Montevista in the dark.
Vera answered the door of the Jamieson house. She was wearing her sunburst kimono, and her black hair was loose on her shoulders. It wasn’t that late. The household seemed to be going to pieces in a quiet way.
“He’s out in the guest house,” she said, “with her.” Vera seemed to resent another woman on the premises.
The guest house was a white frame cottage at the rear of the garden. Light spilled from its half-shuttered windows, reviving the daytime colors of the flower beds around it. Sweet unidentifiable odors drifted in the air.
It seemed like a place for an idyll, instead of the sequel to a tragedy. Life was short and sweet, I thought, sweet and short.
Peter called out: “Who is it?”
I told him, and he opened the door. He had on a bulky gray sweater and an open-collared white shirt which revealed the flabby thickness of his neck. There was a rather peculiar gleam in his eye. It could have been pure innocent happiness; it could have been euphoria.
I had similar doubts about the girl in the bright chintz room behind him. She sat under a lamp with a book on her knee, perfectly calm and still in a black dress. She nodded to me, and that was all.
“Come in, won’t you?” he said.
“You come out.”
He stepped outside, leaving the door partly open. It was a warm night for May, and windless.
“What is it, Mr. Archer? I hate to leave her.”
“Even for a minute?”
“Even for a minute,” he said with a kind of pride.
“I have some findings to report, about her father’s death. I doubt that she’ll want to hear what I have to say. He wasn’t a suicide. He may have died by accident.”
“I think Ginny will want to hear about it.”
Reluctantly I went in and told my story, slightly bowdlerized. Ginny took it more calmly than Peter. His foot kept thumping to a nervous rhythm, as if an uncontrolled part of him wanted to run away, even from a room with Ginny in it.
I said to her: “I’m sorry to have to dig this up and throw it in your lap. You’ve had quite a lot thrown in your lap recently.”
“It’s all right. It’s over now.”
I hoped it was over. Her serenity bothered me. It was like the lifeless serenity of a statue.
“Do you want me to do anything about Mr. Ketchel?”
Peter waited for her to answer. She lifted her hands a few inches and dropped them on her book. “What would be the point? You say he’s a sick old man, hardly more than a vegetable. It’s like one of the condign punishments in Dante. A big violent man turns into a helpless cripple.” She hesitated. “Were he and my father fighting about me?”
“That was the general idea.”
“I don’t understand,” Peter said.
She turned to him. “Mr. Ketchel made a rough pass at me.”
“And you still don’t want him punished?”
“Why should I? That was years ago. I’m not even the same person,” she added unsmilingly. “Did you know we change completely, chemically speaking, every seven years?” She seemed to take comfort in the thought.
“You’re an angel,” he said. But he didn’t go near her or touch her.
“There’s a further possibility,” I said. “Ketchel-Spillman may not have been responsible for your father’s death after all. Somebody else may have found him wandering around the club grounds in a daze, and deliberately drowned him in the swimming pool.”
“Who would do that?” she said.
“Your late husband himself is the best bet. I’ve got some further information on him, by the way. He was a Panamanian who came out of a fairly hard school—”
She interrupted me: “I know that. Professor Tappinger paid me a visit this afternoon. He told me all about Francis. Poor Francis,” she said remotely. “I see now that he wasn’t entirely sane, and neither was I, to be taken in by him. But what conceivable reason could he have for hurting Roy? I didn’t even know him in those days.”
“He may have drowned him to get a hold on Ketchel. Or he may have seen someone else drown him, and convinced Ketchel that it was Ketchel’s fault.”
“You have a horrible imagination, Mr. Archer.”
“So had your late husband.”
“No. You’re mistaken about him. Francis wasn’t like that.”
“You only knew one side of him, I’m afraid. Francis Martel was a made-up character. Did Professor Tappinger tell you his real name was Pedro Domingo, and he was a bastard by-product of the slums of Panama City? That’s all we know about the real man, the real life that forced him into the fantasy life with you.”
“I don’t want to talk about that.” She hugged herself as if she could feel a faint chill of reality through her widow’s black. “Please let’s not talk about Francis.”
Peter rose from his chair. “I quite agree. All that is in the past now. And we’ve had enough talk for one night, Mr. Archer.”
He went to the door and opened it. The sweet night air flooded into the room. I sat where
I was.
“May I ask you a question in private, Miss Fablon? Are you calling yourself Miss Fablon?”
“I suppose so. I hadn’t thought of it.”
“It won’t be ‘Miss Fablon’ for long,” Peter said with foolish blandness. “One of these fine days it’s going to be ‘Mrs. Jamieson,’ the way it was always meant to be.”
Ginny looked resigned, and very tired. “What do you wish to ask me?” she said softly.
“It’s a private question. Tell Peter to go away for a minute.”
“Peter, you heard the man.”
He frowned and went out, leaving the door wide open. I heard him bulling around in the garden.
“Poor old Peter,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do without him now. I don’t know just what I’m going to do with him, either.”
“Marry him?”
“I don’t seem to have any other choice. That sounds cynical, doesn’t it? I didn’t mean it that way. But nothing seems terribly worthwhile right now.”
“It wouldn’t be fair to marry Peter unless you cared about him.”
“Oh, I care for him, more than for anyone. I always have. Francis was just an episode in my life.” Behind her world-weary pose, I caught a hint of her immaturity. I wondered if she had grown emotionally at all since her father died.
And I thought that Ginny and Kitty, girls from opposite ends of the same town, had quite a lot in common after all. Neither one had quite survived the accident of beauty. It had made them into things, zombies in a dead desert world, as painful to contemplate as meaningless crucifixions.
“You and Peter used to go together, he told me.”
“That’s true. Through most of high school. He wasn’t fat in those days,” she added in an explanatory way.
“Were you lovers?”
Her eyes darkened, the way the ocean darkens under moving clouds. For the first time I seemed to have touched her sense of her own life. She turned away so that I couldn’t look into her eyes.
“I don’t see that it matters.” That meant yes.
“Did you become pregnant by Peter?”
“If I answer you,” she said with her face averted, “will you promise never to repeat my answer? To anyone, even Peter?”
“All right.”
“Then I can tell you. We were going to have a baby when I was a freshman in college. I didn’t tell Peter. He was so young, and so young for his age. I didn’t want to frighten him. I didn’t tell anyone, except Roy, and eventually Mother. But even them I didn’t tell who the father was. I had no desire to be taken out of school and forced into one of those horrible teenage marriages. Roy was pretty let-down with me, on account of the baby, but he borrowed a thousand dollars and took me to Tijuana. He treated me to the de luxe abortion, complete with doctor and nurse and hygienic atmosphere. But after that he seemed to feel I owed him money.”
Her voice was toneless. She might have been talking about a shopping trip. But her very flatness of feeling suggested the trauma that kept her emotions fixed. She said without much curiosity:
“How did you find out about my pregnancy? I thought nobody knew.”
“It doesn’t matter how I found out.”
“But I only told Roy and Mother.”
“And they’re dead.”
A barely visible tremor went through her. Slowly, as if against physical resistance, she turned her head and looked into my face.
“You think they were killed because they knew about my pregnancy?”
“It’s possible.”
“What about Francis’s death?”
“I have no theory, Miss Fablon. I’m still groping in the dark. Do you have any ideas?”
She shook her head. Her bright hair swung, touching her cold pale cheeks with a narcissistic caress.
Peter said impatiently from the doorway: “May I come in now?”
“No, you may not. Go away and leave me alone.” She stood up, including me in the invitation to leave.
“But you’re not supposed to be alone,” Peter said. “Dr. Sylvester told me—”
“Dr. Sylvester is an old woman and you’re another. Go away. If you don’t, I’ll move out. Tonight.”
Peter backed out, and I followed him. She closed and bolted the door after us. When we were out of hearing of the cottage, Peter turned on me:
“What did you say to her?”
“Nothing, really.”
“You must have said something to bring on a reaction like that.”
“I asked her a question or two.”
“What about?”
“She asked me not to tell you.”
“She asked you not to tell me?” His face leaned close to mine. I couldn’t see it too well. He sounded wildly angry and belligerent. “You’ve got things turned around, haven’t you? You’re my employee. Ginny is my fiancée.”
“She’s kind of an instant fiancée, isn’t she?”
Perhaps I shouldn’t have said it. Peter called me a filthy crud and swung on me. I saw his fist arriving out of the darkness too late to duck it cleanly. I rolled my head away from the blow, diminishing its sting.
I didn’t hit him back, but I put up my hands to catch a second punch in case he threw one. He didn’t, at least not physically.
“Go away,” he said in a sobbing voice. “You and I are finished. You’re finished here.”
chapter 31
IT WAS A MORAL HARDSHIP for me to walk away from an unclosed case. I went back to my apartment in West Los Angeles and drank myself into a moderate stupor.
Even so I didn’t sleep too well. I woke up in the middle of the night. A spatter of rain was rustling like cellophane at the window. The whisky was wearing off and I saw myself in a flicker of panic: a middle-aging man lying alone in darkness while life fled by like traffic on the freeway.
I got up late and went out for breakfast. The morning papers reported no new developments. I went to my office and waited for Peter to change his mind and phone me.
I didn’t really need him, I told myself. I still had some of his money. Even without it, and even without his backing in Montevista, I could go out and work with Perlberg on the Martel killing. But for some important reason I wanted him to rehire me. I think in my nighttime loneliness I’d fathered an imaginary son, a poor fat foolish son who ate his sorrow instead of drinking it.
The sun burned off the morning fog and dried the pavements. My depression lifted more slowly. I went through my mail in search of hopeful omens.
An interesting-looking envelope from Spain had pictures of General Franco on the stamps and was addressed to Señor Lew Archer. The letter inside said: “Cordiales Saludos: This comes to you from far-off Spain to call your attention to our new Fiesta line of furniture with its authentically Spanish motif as exciting as a corrida, as colorful as a flamenco dance. Come see it at any one of our Greater Los Angeles stores.”
The piece of junk mail I liked best was a folder from the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce. Among the attractions of the city it mentioned swimming, golf, tennis, bowling, water-skiing, eating, going to shows, and going to church, but not a word about gambling.
It was an omen. While I was still smiling over the folder, Captain Perlberg phoned me.
“You busy, Archer?”
“Not so very. My client lost interest.”
“Too bad,” he said cheerfully. “You could do us both a favor. How would you like to talk to Martel’s old lady?”
“His mother?”
“That’s what I said. She jetted in from Panama this morning and she’s screaming for us to release her son’s body, also for information. You know more about the background of the case than I do, and I thought if you were willing to talk it over with her, you could save us an international incident.”
“Where is she now?”
“She took a suite in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Right at the moment she’s sleeping, but she’ll be expecting you early this afternoon, say around two-fifteen? She’d make a nice clien
t for you.”
“Who would pay me?”
“She would. The woman is loaded.”
“I thought she was from hunger.”
“You thought wrong,” Perlberg said. “The consul general told me she’s married to the vice-president of a bank in Panama City.”
“What’s his name?”
“Rosales. Ricardo Rosales.”
It was the name of the vice-president of the Bank of New Granada who had written the letter to Marietta telling her that there would be no more money.
“I’ll be glad to pay a visit to Mrs. Rosales.”
I called Professor Allan Bosch at Los Angeles State College. Bosch said he’d be happy to have lunch with me and brief me on Pedro Domingo, but he still had a time problem.
“I can drive out there, professor. Do you have a restaurant on the L.A. State campus?”
“We have three eating places,” he said. “The Cafeteria, the Inferno, and the Top of the North. Incidentally our name’s been changed to Cal State L.A.”
“The Inferno sounds interesting.”
“It’s less interesting than it sounds. Actually it’s just an automat. Why don’t we meet at the Top of the North? That’s on top of North Hall.”
The college is on the eastern border of the city. I took the Hollywood Freeway to the San Bernardino Freeway, which I left at the Eastern Avenue turnoff. The campus was a sort of chopped-off hill crowded with buildings. Parking spaces were scarce. Eventually I parked in a faculty slot, and rode the elevator six stories up to the Top of the North.
Professor Bosch was a youthful-looking man in his middle thirties, tall enough to play center on a basketball team. He had a big man’s slouch, and a bright disenchanted eye. His speech was staccato, with a Middle Western accent.
“I’m surprised you made it on time. It’s quite a drive. I saved us a place by the window.”
He led me to a table on the east side of the large buzzing room. Through the window I could see out toward Pasadena and the mountains.
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