A Match Made for Murder

by Iona Whishaw

  The thing that puzzled him the most, really, was that not only had his typed-up notes gone missing but the notebook in which he’d written his original notes was gone as well. He remembered putting it in the drawer next to the manila folder. The notebook had been full, and though it was not his usual practice, he’d tossed it in where he kept his typewritten notes before he took them for filing. He closed his eyes and saw himself putting the folder into the drawer, and then the notebook, and he saw himself locking the drawer at night when he went home. But he couldn’t make the exact connection between the day he’d slipped the notes in and that particular night. He locked that drawer every night. Had he walked to Galloway’s office with the folder to talk with him about them? Had he gone to the water cooler still holding the file and left it sitting on something? It shook him to think he couldn’t remember clearly. Of course, he knew why he couldn’t really remember details about water coolers and other people’s desks: because taking the files for central filing was a routine activity, and it’s what he would have done.

  He got up and went across to where Officer Alba sat. He would send him on the robbery in South Tucson; then he was going to do one more thorough search of the station for his folder.

  Lane was in the lobby gazing down at some silver and turquoise bracelets in a glass case. She ought to bring something back for Angela, who’d been so wonderful about organizing her wedding and had been right to pooh-pooh Lane’s assertion that she just wanted a simple and discreet wedding. She became aware the woman behind the counter had stopped hovering and had moved away from her to the end of the counter.

  “Yes? What do you want?”

  The disapproval in her voice made Lane look up to see Chela Ruiz standing uncertainly in the doorway. Lane smiled and said as brightly as possible. “Oh, hello, Chela. How nice to see you.”

  Chela nodded and looked nervously at the manager. “I have to talk to this lady.”

  Frowning, the woman looked at Lane. “Madam?”

  Lane smiled again. “Yes, of course. I think she’s found something I’ve lost. What a dear! Could you put those earrings aside for me? I think they are just the thing for my friend. I’m in number 26.”

  “Certainly, madam.”

  Chela led Lane down the long, carpeted hallway, and out the rear door where the cleaning supplies were kept. “I saw her again, miss. The car came again for her today, only this time I had a look to see who was driving. It wasn’t the same man.”

  Lane glanced toward the gate and then to the street outside. “You mean Mrs. Holden? What do you mean not the same man?”

  Chela whispered, “Not the young man she, you know . . . This one was older. Not as old as her husband, maybe more like her. She seemed to know him well. He touched her leg when she got into the car.”

  Was this the man she’d seen Meg talking to in town? “Chela, you have to talk to the police. Could you describe him?”

  “Yes, sort of. He was a little heavier; he had a brown suit. He had a big nose, like someone who drinks a lot. But I can’t talk to them, miss! That’s why I’m telling you. You could talk to them. You could tell them if you think it’s important.”

  Lane shook her head. “I don’t know if it’s important or not, but she was there when that poor man was shot. I know the police are going to want to know anything that may be out of the ordinary. I’ve met the sergeant in charge. He’s called Martinez. He’s very nice and not at all frightening. But he won’t be satisfied from hearing anything second-hand from me. If you want, I’ll go with you.”

  Chela surprised Lane by collapsing onto an overturned bucket and beginning to cry. “No, you don’t understand. Raúl, he—”

  “Your brother? Would he be angry for some reason?”

  “It’s just that he can’t be noticed by the police. He doesn’t have a birth certificate. My parents were poor when he was born, and he didn’t get one. They’re always checking. If they ask him and he can’t produce one, they’ll deport him.”

  “Oh.” Lane was stymied. “But was he born here?”

  “Yes, even my parents and grandparents were. But when people get in trouble and they don’t have papers they send them across the border. Some of them have never even been there. They don’t even have relatives over there.”

  “But no one is in trouble here, Chela,” Lane said reasonably. “And your brother doesn’t have to come into it. He didn’t see anything. You did. Do you have a birth certificate?”

  Chela nodded, but she looked unconvinced.

  “Look. I’ll call Sergeant Martinez and we can go together. He’ll be much more interested in solving the murder than talking about Raúl.”

  It hadn’t been easy, but Chela had been persuaded to talk to the police, and Lane hurried back to the room to talk to Darling and call Martinez. Darling, however, was nowhere to be found. She went out and across the grounds to the pool, but he was not among the sunbathers. Muttering “blast!” under her breath, she went back to the room and shuffled through a couple of papers till she found the number Darling had written.

  “It happens I was just about to come out there,” Martinez said, when she’d explained.

  “Oh. Chela works on the cleaning staff here. I’m a bit worried about how the management would view it. We couldn’t come there, could we?”

  Martinez sighed. “Look, can you give me a rundown of what she said? I need to go there because I have to interview . . .” He was about to tell her and then he stopped. “I have to interview someone else there. If what she says is relevant, I’ll meet her after she leaves for the day. What time is that, do you know?”

  “I think she starts very early, so I suspect probably around four, but I can check for you.” Lane went on to tell Martinez about the mystery man Meg Holden seemed to have met more than once. “The thing is, that Mrs. Holden seems to have a young man that she meets as well. Both Chela and I have seen them together, as it happens.”

  Martinez shook his head at the folly of humans, remembering his own father who had an affair with a woman for nearly the full length of his marriage and even had children with her. It interested him that women could carry on like that as well. “Thank you. Just tell the maid that I will arrange to meet her after work.”

  “She’ll be very relieved, thank you.”

  Darling, looking as animated as a thoroughly self- contained man could, arrived just as Lane was hanging up the telephone. “They have a tennis pro here,” he said.

  Chapter Ten

  “For God’s sake, Ned. I told you. This doesn’t change anything.” Ivy Renwick folded her gloved hands tightly together and looked with distaste around his room. “How can you stay here? I could have paid for you to stay at the inn. No one would have been any the wiser.”

  “I would have been. I don’t want to be a kept man. All I wanted was what was mine. Anyway, that Canadian couple recognized the family resemblance right away. He’s a policeman. Can you beat that? Anyway, I’d hardly be incognito.”

  Ned sounded petulant, and Ivy felt a rush of impatience and, she realized with surprise, anxiety. She saw again that image of Jack lying dead under the bedspread, and the memory triggered a lurch of sickness. She moved toward the door.

  “Look, I think we’d better lay off. I have to get Jack’s body home as soon as this nightmare is over, and I have to get to the office to sort things out. This has been a mistake.”

  “That’s my baby in there,” Ned said. “Or are you forgetting that?”

  “It would be hard to. You remind me every five minutes.”

  “Look,” Ned went back to being conciliatory. “You’re right. We should lay off. When this is over, we can get married. You know the board is going to want me to take over the company. They won’t want a woman. It’s logical, especially if we’re married. You’d still be part of the decision making.”

  Ivy stood by the door looking at him
. Could he have picked a more sordid rooming house? He couldn’t manage his way out of a paper bag, she thought, let alone the company. She would cope with the board. It amazed her that he didn’t know how much they disliked him. He’d been several times to the chairman railing against his brother being in charge. At least one of those times he’d been drunk. No. She felt quite sure of the board. “Of course, darling. We’ll talk about it when this is over. In the meantime, don’t contact me.” She had no intention of talking about anything with him. She looked right, then left when she stepped onto the street, and then realized how shifty she must look, like a criminal trying to avoid detection. She held up her hand for a cab and wondered why she had never seen him before as he really was.

  Mr. Van Eyck, leaving the garage to go deal with the percolator he’d left on the stove, looked toward the car where Ames and Tina were sitting in the front seat. He smiled. Maybe something would come of it. He liked the young sergeant. But Tina had been pretty prickly on the subject of men since before the war. He wondered if he should invite them in to join him for a cup of coffee but then thought he would just let nature take its course.

  He would have been disappointed by the course it was taking. The mood in the car was tense.

  “Fine,” she said. “You’re right. I didn’t tell you the truth! I had a good reason, okay?”

  “Perhaps you’d better tell me what really happened between you and Mr. Watts when he came the other day,” Ames said as clinically as he could manage.

  “I told him to go to hell. There. Are you satisfied?” Tina had an elbow up on the passenger side window frame and was resting her head on her hand, looking angrily out the window.

  Ames had nothing to say to this. He wasn’t satisfied, but it seemed obvious she hadn’t been planning to run off with Watts. She must have been at the garage while he was meeting his end. Obvious or not, he knew he had to ask. “Were you planning to go away with him?”

  “Are you out of your mind? I would drown myself in the lake before I spent one minute with him.”

  “But why didn’t you tell me the truth yesterday?”

  “You want to know the truth? The truth is that I bet there are a thousand people who would be happy to learn that man is dead. He was a repulsive, manipulating bastard.”

  “What people?”

  “Anyone who has a daughter, believe me. Brothers, mothers, fathers.”

  “Your father too?”

  Tina wheeled on him. “Why would you say that, Daniel? Dad knows nothing about it. I never told him.”

  Ames sat quietly, his lips pressed together. The use of his first name had stung. She sounded hurt. He was making a hash of this and was now sorry he’d left Terrell behind. He had to keep this professional, but it was getting difficult.

  “Never told him what, Miss Van Eyck?”

  She held his gaze a moment as if sizing him up. “Look. All you need to know is that we did, yes, have an argument, and I sent him packing. As for yesterday, my dad and I were here most of the time.” This was mostly true, she thought. Her dad had gone off in the afternoon, but she’d been there. “Several people came and went during the day. If you want, I can give you their names, since you don’t seem to believe me. Otherwise you can just leave us the hell alone!”

  Tina got out of the car and slammed the door, causing Ames to wince. He saw her father come to the window at the sound. It was too far away to make out his expression.

  Sitting outside the Watts cottage, which was looking tranquil and almost cozy with smoke curling out of its chimney and a light in the front window glowing against the rapidly spreading darkness of the inclement winter afternoon, Ames sighed. More complicated questions and another angry woman to deal with.

  Once admitted, Ames stood awkwardly on the mat just inside the door.

  “I just have to ask a couple of other questions.” Mrs. Watts looked tired, but not particularly sad, which he found surprising. For one thing she smiled at him, an expression that lit up her face and gave a hint at what an attractive woman she must have been before life caught up with her.

  “Well, you’d better come in and sit down. I gather you found the bag. Don’t worry. I’m prepared for anything. I know this is going to sound horrible, but I find myself almost relieved when all is said and done. He wasn’t an easy man, and I suspect I stopped loving him even before Sadie was born. He didn’t love me, but I think he loved her, if he was capable at all of love.”

  Unable to say anything to this, Ames, now sitting uncomfortably at the table, looked down and then cleared his throat. “We did find the bag, yes. We found not only a couple of changes of clothes for him but also a couple of frocks, some lady’s underwear.” He cleared his throat again. “Blue dress, with flowers and a red one?”

  Mrs. Watts’s face darkened. “You don’t say. Well. I’m not surprised somehow. Not my dresses, Sergeant, I can tell you that.” She sat down. “I suppose that explains all his absences.” She made a move as if to shut the door on him. “I want the car back. I called the station this morning. I can’t do a thing without it.”

  “Do you have an extra set of keys? We still haven’t found any.”

  “No. I don’t think I do. I hadn’t thought about that,” Mrs. Watts said.

  “That shouldn’t be a problem. We’ve almost finished with it. The trunk lock is broken, but I’ll get it fixed and then have someone drop it back as soon as possible. I can maybe get a locksmith to make another set of keys while I’m at it.” When she did not respond to his offer, he cleared his throat. “We did find traces of black paint in the trunk, and we now suspect that your husband might have used it to deface the door of a local garage.”

  Mrs. Watts turned her head away sharply, as if she couldn’t trust what she might say. She finally turned to look at him. “That as well. Where? No. Don’t tell me. Some sordid mess he got himself into behind my back.” Her anger was palpable. “Anything else, Sergeant?”

  Ames arrived back at the station in a very unsatisfactory state. He reflected on the almost red-hot anger with which Mrs. Watts had responded to the finding of the dresses, and the possibility that her husband had been responsible for defacing a local business. It seemed in direct contradiction to the calm acceptance she appeared to show earlier when she had said she didn’t love her husband and suspected he didn’t love her. And there was the business of Tina, which he’d also made a mess of.

  He thought again about how Darling would have been able to negotiate the problem of an angry witness like Tina, how he dropped his voice, dug in, used a completely neutral courtesy so the witness felt safe and went off the burn. She’d lied about her angry interaction with Watts, who had—or so the working theory suggested—subsequently driven to the garage in the middle of the night and painted it to get back at her. Something his wife hadn’t realized he’d done. It hardly seemed to matter now, though it would conclusively clear up the matter of the damage to the garage door. He threw his hat onto the rack and took off his overcoat.

  Terrell appeared at the door with his notebook open. “Sir?”

  “You have something? More odd things, perhaps?”

  Terrell smiled. “Yes indeed, sir.”

  “Pull up a pew,” he said. “I came up empty. Miss Van Eyck wasn’t trying to run away with him; she was at the garage all day, she says, and now she’s in a snit. And the clothes don’t belong to Mrs. Watts, according to her. In fact, she’s adapted quite quickly to being a widow. I did tell her about the splodge of paint in the trunk of the car and explained our suspicion about her husband and the paint on the garage door. She was extremely angry, but I don’t know if it was at me or her faithless husband.” He frowned; a thought about this had bubbled up then and had gone again just as quickly. He sighed. “What have you got?”

  Terrell opened his book. “Okay, I talked to the people at the station, including his boss. He does, did, work there as a
yardman, which is why that woman coming off the ferry recognized the licence from seeing his car at the station. However, he no longer works as a foreman. He’d been demoted a couple of months back after a conflict arose with the men. When I asked what the conflict was about, he told me he had no idea, but it was clear Watts was no leader, as discipline had become lax and work wasn’t getting done.

  “So I went and talked to several of the men. They said the whole thing started between him and one of the men. Something about a girl. Someone called Finch. Hang on.” He flipped a page. “Yes, here we go. Craig Finch wasn’t there today, but I hope to catch him tomorrow. I got his address, though, sir, if we want to go talk to him at home. I got a feeling people knew something, but they weren’t that forthcoming.” Terrell didn’t tell Ames that he’d been told by one of the men to get the police department to send a “real” police officer next time. The courtesy of the foreman made up for it.

  Ames frowned. “And what about these trips Watts’s wife said he took?”

  “Not for work. In fact, according to them he rarely missed a day of work.”

  “So then, he’s spending nights somewhere nearby when he was supposedly away on work trips? And now he is running off with someone for, judging by the contents of the bag, a lost weekend, only he dies of a heart attack and the woman, whoever she is, takes advantage of the situation and robs him and, for good measure, locks him in the car. And goes where? It’s just the strangeness of the whole thing.”

  “My questions exactly, sir.”

  Sergeant Martinez, frustrated again by finding no trace of his folder, put his cap on and prepared to go to the inn. He picked up his new notebook, sitting in the wooden tray where he always kept them, and made his way between the desks to the door.