“I’m asking you.”
“Shucks, Al is old enough to be her father. He’s all wrapped up in his own girls, Anita in particular. He worships the ground she walks on. She’s the mainspring of that family.”
“How did he get on with Ginnie?”
“Very well. They kidded back and forth. She was the only one who could ever make him smile. Al is a sad man, you know. He had a tragedy in his life.”
“His wife’s death?”
“It was worse than that,” Green said. “Al Brocco killed his wife with his own hand. He caught her with another man and put a knife in her.”
“And he’s walking around loose?”
“The other man was a Mex,” Green said in an explanatory way. “A wetback. He couldn’t even talk the English language. The town hardly blamed Al, the jury gave him manslaughter. But when he got out of the pen, the people at the Pink Flamingo wouldn’t give him his old job back—he used to be chef there. So I took him on. I felt sorry for his girls, I guess, and Al’s been a good worker. A man doesn’t do a thing like that twice, you know.”
He did another slow mental double take. His mouth hung open. I could see the gold in its corners.
“Let’s hope not.”
“Listen here,” he said. “You go to work for me, eh? You nail the guy, whoever he is. I’ll pay you. I’ll pay you now. How much do you want?”
I took a hundred dollars of his money and left him trying to comfort himself with the rest of it. The smell of grease stayed in my nostrils.
—
Connor’s house clung to the edge of a low bluff about halfway between the HP station and the mouth of the canyon where the thing had begun: a semi-cantilevered redwood cottage with a closed double garage fronting the highway. From the grapestake-fenced patio in the angle between the garage and the front door a flight of wooden steps climbed to the flat roof which was railed as a sun deck. A second set of steps descended the fifteen or twenty feet to the beach.
I tripped on a pair of garden shears crossing the patio to the garage window. I peered into the interior twilight. Two things inside interested me: a dismasted flattie sitting on a trailer, and a car. The sailboat interested me because its cordage resembled the white rope that had strangled Ginnie. The car interested me because it was an imported model, a low-slung Triumph two-seater.
I was planning to have a closer look at it when a woman’s voice screeked overhead like a gull’s:
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Mrs. Connor was leaning over the railing on the roof. Her hair was in curlers. She looked like a blond Gorgon. I smiled up at her, the way that Greek whose name I don’t remember must have smiled.
“Your husband invited me for a drink, remember? I don’t know whether he gave me a rain check or not.”
“He did not! Go away! My husband is sleeping!”
“Ssh. You’ll wake him up. You’ll wake up the people in Forest Lawn.”
She put her hand to her mouth. From the expression on her face she seemed to be biting her hand. She disappeared for a moment, and then came down the steps with a multicolored silk scarf over her curlers. The rest of her was sheathed in a white satin bathing suit. Against it her flesh looked like brown wood.
“You get out of here,” she said. “Or I shall call the police.”
“Fine. Call them. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“Are you implying that we have?”
“We’ll see. Why did you leave your husband?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“I’m making it my business, Mrs. Connor. I’m a detective investigating the murder of Ginnie Green. Did you leave Frank on account of Ginnie Green?”
“No. No! I wasn’t even aware—” Her hand went to her mouth again. She chewed on it some more.
“You weren’t aware that Frank was having an affair with Ginnie Green?”
“He wasn’t.”
“So you say. Others say different.”
“What others? Anita Brocco? You can’t believe anything that woman says. Why, her own father is a murderer, everybody in town knows that.”
“Your own husband may be another, Mrs. Connor. You might as well come clean with me.”
“But I have nothing to tell you.”
“You can tell me why you left him.”
“That is a private matter, between Frank and me. It has nothing to do with anybody but us.” She was calming down, setting her moral forces in a stubborn, defensive posture.
“There’s usually only the one reason.”
“I had my reasons. I said they were none of your business. I chose for reasons of my own to spend a month with my parents in Long Beach.”
“When did you come back?”
“This morning.”
“Why this morning?”
“Frank called me. He said he needed me.” She touched her thin breast absently, pathetically, as if perhaps she hadn’t been much needed in the past.
“Needed you for what?”
“As his wife,” she said. “He said there might be tr—” Her hand went to her mouth again. She said around it: “Trouble.”
“Did he name the kind of trouble?”
“No.”
“What time did he call you?”
“Very early, around seven o’clock.”
“That was more than an hour before I found Ginnie’s body.”
“He knew she was missing. He spent the whole night looking for her.”
“Why would he do that, Mrs. Connor?”
“She was his student. He was fond of her. Besides, he was more or less responsible for her.”
“Responsible for her death?”
“How dare you say a thing like that!”
“If he dared to do it, I can dare to say it.”
“He didn’t!” she cried. “Frank is a good man. He may have his faults, but he wouldn’t kill anyone. I know him.”
“What are his faults?”
“We won’t discuss them.”
“Then may I have a look in your garage?”
“What for? What are you looking for?”
“I’ll know when I find it.” I turned toward the garage door.
“You mustn’t go in there,” she said intensely. “Not without Frank’s permission.”
“Wake him up and we’ll get his permission.”
“I will not. He got no sleep last night.”
“Then I’ll just have a look without his permission.”
“I’ll kill you if you go in there.”
She picked up the garden shears and brandished them at me—a sick-looking lioness defending her overgrown cub. The cub himself opened the front door of the cottage. He slouched in the doorway groggily, naked except for white shorts.
“What goes on, Stella?”
“This man has been making the most horrible accusations.”
His blurred glance wavered between us and focused on her. “What did he say?”
“I won’t repeat it.”
“I will, Mr. Connor. I think you were Ginnie Green’s lover, if that’s the word. I think she followed you to this house last night, around midnight. I think she left it with a rope around her neck.”
Connor’s head jerked. He started to make a move in my direction. Something inhibited it, like an invisible leash. His body slanted toward me, static, all the muscles taut. It resembled an anatomy specimen with the skin off. Even his face seemed mostly bone and teeth.
I hoped he’d swing on me and let me hit him. He didn’t. Stella Connor dropped the garden shears. They made a noise like the dull clank of doom.
“Aren’t you going to deny it, Frank?”
“I didn’t kill her. I swear I didn’t. I admit that we—that we were together last night, Ginnie and I.”
“Ginnie and I?” the woman repeated incredulously.
His head hung down. “I’m sorry, Stella. I didn’t want to hurt you more than I have already. But it has to come out. I took up with the girl
after you left. I was lonely and feeling sorry for myself. Ginnie kept hanging around. One night I drank too much and let it happen. It happened more than once. I was so flattered that a pretty young girl—”
“You fool!” she said in a deep, harsh voice.
“Yes, I’m a moral fool. That’s no surprise to you, is it?”
“I thought you respected your pupils, at least. You mean to say you brought her into our own house, into our own bed?”
“You’d left. It wasn’t ours any more. Besides, she came of her own accord. She wanted to come. She loved me.”
She said with grinding contempt: “You poor, groveling ninny. And to think you had the gall to ask me to come back here, to make you look respectable.”
I cut in between them. “Was she here last night, Connor?”
“She was here. I didn’t invite her. I wanted her to come, but I dreaded it, too. I knew that I was taking an awful chance. I drank quite a bit to numb my conscience—”
“What conscience?” Stella Connor said.
“I have a conscience,” he said without looking at her. “You don’t know the hell I’ve been going through. After she came, after it happened last night, I drank myself unconscious.”
“Do you mean after you killed her?” I said.
“I didn’t kill her. When I passed out, she was perfectly all right. She was sitting up drinking a cup of instant coffee. The next thing I knew, hours later, her father was on the telephone and she was gone.”
“Are you trying to pull the old blackout alibi? You’ll have to do better than that.”
“I can’t. It’s the truth.”
“Let me into your garage.”
He seemed almost glad to be given an order, a chance for some activity. The garage wasn’t locked. He raised the overhead door and let the daylight into the interior. It smelled of paint. There were empty cans of marine paint on a bench beside the sailboat. Its hull gleamed virgin white.
“I painted my flattie last week,” he said inconsequentially.
“You do a lot of sailing?”
“I used to. Not much lately.”
“No,” his wife said from the doorway. “Frank changed his hobby to women. Wine and women.”
“Lay off, eh?” His voice was pleading.
She looked at him from a great and stony silence.
—
I walked around the boat, examining the cordage. The starboard jib line had been sheared off short. Comparing it with the port line, I found that the missing piece was approximately a yard long. That was the length of the piece of white rope that I was interested in.
“Hey!” Connor grabbed the end of the cut line. He fingered it as if it was a wound in his own flesh. “Who’s been messing with my lines? Did you cut it, Stella?”
“I never go near your blessed boat,” she said.
“I can tell you where the rest of that line is, Connor. A line of similar length and color and thickness was wrapped around Ginnie Green’s neck when I found her.”
“Surely you don’t believe I put it there?”
I tried to, but I couldn’t. Small-boat sailers don’t cut their jib lines, even when they’re contemplating murder. And while Connor was clearly no genius, he was smart enough to have known that the line could easily be traced to him. Perhaps someone else had been equally smart.
I turned to Mrs. Connor. She was standing in the doorway with her legs apart. Her body was almost black against the daylight. Her eyes were hooded by the scarf on her head.
“What time did you get home, Mrs. Connor?”
“About ten o’clock this morning. I took a bus as soon as my husband called. But I’m in no position to give him an alibi.”
“An alibi wasn’t what I had in mind. I suggest another possibility, that you came home twice. You came home unexpectedly last night, saw the girl in the house with your husband, waited in the dark till the girl came out, waited with a piece of rope in your hands—a piece of rope you’d cut from your husband’s boat in the hope of getting him punished for what he’d done to you. But the picture doesn’t fit the frame, Mrs. Connor. A sailor like your husband wouldn’t cut a piece of line from his own boat. And even in the heat of murder he wouldn’t tie a granny’s knot. His fingers would automatically tie a reef knot. That isn’t true of a woman’s fingers.”
She held herself upright with one long, rigid arm against the doorframe.
“I wouldn’t do anything like that. I wouldn’t do that to Frank.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t in daylight, Mrs. Connor. Things have different shapes at midnight.”
“And hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? Is that what you’re thinking? You’re wrong. I wasn’t here last night. I was in bed in my father’s house in Long Beach. I didn’t even know about that girl and Frank.”
“Then why did you leave him?”
“He was in love with another woman. He wanted to divorce me and marry her. But he was afraid—afraid that it would affect his position in town. He told me on the phone this morning that it was all over with the other woman. So I agreed to come back to him.” Her arm dropped to her side.
“He said that it was all over with Ginnie?”
Possibilities were racing through my mind. There was the possibility that Connor had been playing reverse English, deliberately and clumsily framing himself in order to be cleared. But that was out of far left field.
“Not Ginnie,” his wife said. “The other woman was Anita Brocco. He met her last spring in the course of work and fell in love—what he calls love. My husband is a foolish, fickle man.”
“Please, Stella. I said it was all over between me and Anita, and it is.”
She turned on him in quiet savagery. “What does it matter now? If it isn’t one girl it’s another. Any kind of female flesh will do to poultice your sick little ego.”
Her cruelty struck inward and hurt her. She stretched out her hand toward him. Suddenly her eyes were blind with tears.
“Any flesh but mine, Frank,” she said brokenly.
Connor paid no attention to his wife.
He said to me in a hushed voice:
“My God, I never thought, I noticed her car last night when I was walking home along the beach.”
“Whose car?”
“Anita’s red Fiat. It was parked at the viewpoint a few hundred yards from here.” He gestured vaguely toward town. “Later, when Ginnie was with me, I thought I heard someone in the garage. But I was too drunk to make a search.” His eyes burned into mine. “You say a woman tied that knot?”
“All we can do is ask her.”
We started toward my car together. His wife called after him:
“Don’t go, Frank. Let him handle it.”
He hesitated, a weak man caught between opposing forces.
“I need you,” she said. “We need each other.”
I pushed him in her direction.
—
It was nearly four when I got to the HP station. The patrol cars had gathered like homing pigeons for the change in shift. Their uniformed drivers were talking and laughing inside.
Anita Brocco wasn’t among them. A male dispatcher, a fat-faced man with pimples, had taken her place behind the counter.
“Where’s Miss Brocco?” I asked.
“In the ladies’ room. Her father is coming to pick her up any minute.”
She came out wearing lipstick and a light beige coat. Her face turned beige when she saw my face. She came toward me in slow motion, leaned with both hands flat on the counter. Her lipstick looked like fresh blood on a corpse.
“You’re a handsome woman, Anita. Too bad about you.”
“Too bad.” It was half a statement and half a question. She looked down at her hands.
“Your fingernails are clean now. They were dirty this morning. You were digging in the dirt last night, weren’t you?”
“No.”
“You were, though. You saw them together and you couldn’t stand it. You waited in ambush w
ith a rope, and put it around her neck. Around your own neck, too.”
She touched her neck. The talk and laughter had subsided around us. I could hear the tick of the clock again, and the muttering signals coming in from inner space.
“What did you use to cut the rope with, Anita? The garden shears?”
Her red mouth groped for words and found them. “I was crazy about him. She took him away. It was all over before it started. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wanted him to suffer.”
“He’s suffering. He’s going to suffer more.”
“He deserves to. He was the only man—” She shrugged in a twisted way and looked down at her breast. “I didn’t want to kill her, but when I saw them together—I saw them through the window. I saw her take off her clothes and put them on. Then I thought of the night my father—when he—when there was all the blood in Mother’s bed. I had to wash it out of the sheets.”
The men around me were murmuring. One of them, a sergeant, raised his voice.
“Did you kill Ginnie Green?”
“Yes.”
“Are you ready to make a statement?” I said.
“Yes. I’ll talk to Sheriff Pearsall. I don’t want to talk here, in front of my friends.” She looked around doubtfully.
“I’ll take you downtown.”
“Wait a minute.” She glanced once more at her empty hands. “I left my purse in the—in the back room. I’ll go and get it.”
She crossed the office like a zombie, opened a plain door, closed it behind her. She didn’t come out. After a while we broke the lock and went in after her.
Her body was cramped on the narrow floor. The ivory-handled nail file lay by her right hand. There were bloody holes in her white blouse and in the white breast under it. One of them had gone as deep as her heart.
Later Al Brocco drove up in her red Fiat and came into the station.
“I’m a little late,” he said to the room in general. “Anita wanted me to give her car a good cleaning. Where is she, anyway?”
The sergeant cleared his throat to answer Brocco.
All us poor creatures, as the old man of the mountain had said that morning.
SLEEPING DOG
The day after her dog disappeared, Fay Hooper called me early. Her normal voice was like waltzing violins, but this morning the violins were out of tune. She sounded as though she’d been crying.
The Archer Files Page 42