Confidentially Yours (12 page)

“All clear,” she whispered. “There was nobody in sight.” The car was in motion then, and turned right, east along Clebourne. I kept my head down, but could see the blinking amber light as we passed the first street intersection. She turned left at the next one. We were going north on Montrose. I heard a car pass, going the other way. In a few minutes we turned left again, and appeared to be climbing, and I heard gravel under the tires. We made another sharp left turn, went on a few yards very slowly, and stopped. She cut the engine and I heard the click as she switched off the headlights. “Okay, Duke,” she said softly.

I sat up. The car was parked on the brow of the hill just back of the city limits on the north side of town. Behind us and on the left were dark lines of trees, but it was open in front, where the hill started to drop away, and I could see the lighted artery of Clebourne stretching away below us from right to left, from one end of town to the other. We were completely alone up here. The wind had stopped, but there was the sharp bite of frost in the air, and when I opened the door and got out the sky was aflame with the cold glitter of stars. I stood for a moment beside the car, looking out over the town where I was born and where I’d lived most of my life, but all I could think of was the back room of the Carthage Funeral Home where the two of them lay with their shattered and unrecognizable faces on individual white enamel tabletops, and the fact that somewhere in that cluster of lights was the man who had killed them. Asleep, maybe? Or could he sleep? And what was it like just at the moment of waking? I tried to shake off these morbid reflections and get back to a more practical view of the matter; there was more than that down there. There were men who were going to arrest me for murder if they could get their hands on me. I opened the front door and slid in on the seat beside Barbara. She moved over some parcels to make room for me.

“Here,” she said, picking up one of the things lying on the seat. It was a pint bottle of whiskey.

“You’re an angel,” I said.

“No, a St. Bernard, but I get tired of that little cask around my neck. When you’ve had a drink of that, there’s some food.”

I took a big drink—straight out of the bottle when she said she didn’t want any—felt it unfold inside me, and opened the cardboard box. It contained a steak sandwich, wrapped in three or four big paper napkins and still warm. I tore into it, suddenly realizing I hadn’t had anything to eat except a couple of those plywood sandwiches in over 48 hours. When I’d finished it, she uncapped a pint thermos bottle of coffee and poured me a cup.

“Where are the dancing girls, and my Turkish water pipe?” I asked. She grinned, the slender face just visible in the starlight, and dug cigarettes out of her purse. I held the lighter for her, and then lit my own. She was wearing a rough tweed skirt and a sweater, and a cloth coat with the collar turned up under the cascade of reddish brown hair.

“Now,” she said, “as they say on Madison Avenue, let’s kick this thing around and see what we stub our toe on.”

“Right. But first let me say that if I ever get out of this mess, the first thing I’m going to do is petition the court to have you adopt me.” I repeated the whole story of night before last, beginning with the anonymous telephone call.

When I’d finished, she nodded, and said, “Maybe you could use a guardian, with that hot-headed approach to everything. But let’s break it down. First, Mulholland could have known she was home. If he saw the gloves, he should have realized that was her suitcase. And he left the courthouse while you were still there?”

“Yes. Probably an hour before George and I left.”

“But on the other hand, it’s almost certain she called somebody the minute you left the house. That’s why the line was busy when I tried to call you, because I’m positive it was after eleven-forty-five. So it could have been anybody. Now, remember carefully—how long do you think it was from the time you called George Clement until he arrived in the Sheriff’s office?”

“Not over ten minutes,” I said, and then did a delayed take.
“George?”

“Why not?” she asked. “That’s the way the police operate, from all the mysteries I’ve read. Anybody’s under suspicion until he’s been cleared by the facts. Also, there’s something else I’ll get to shortly—a couple of things—but first let’s look at that ten minutes. How many blocks would he have to drive to go from his to your house and then to the courthouse?”

I ran it in my mind, beginning at his house in the east end of town. Three west on Clebourne, five south on Montrose, five back, three more west on Clebourne, and two north on Stanley. “Eighteen. It’s impossible. Also, he had to dress.”

“He
said
he had to dress. But suppose he was already dressed and on his way out, because of another telephone call he’d received a few minutes before?”

I turned. “By God—!”

“And unless time was a factor—that is, to him—why would he even mention it? It’s not in character. Clement has a brilliant and incisive mind, the type that seldom wastes time on trivia.”

“But, still— Ten minutes? It’s not enough.”

She went on. “There would have been little or no traffic at that time of night. We’ll clock it, under the same conditions, and see. That’s one of the things I picked you up for.”

“But wait a minute,” I broke in, as the absurdity of it began to dawn on me. “This is George Clement we’re talking about, the ex-mayor, the leading citizen; he’s so proper and law-abiding he’s a little stuffy sometimes. Also, he’s a friend of mine—and of hers—we played bridge together an average of once a week.”

“Yes, I know,” she said calmly.

“And, listen—I don’t think anybody on earth could have walked away from the horror in that bedroom and then, in less than three or four minutes at the outside, into another room where there were people, without its showing on his face. Something would have twitched, or there’d have been no color—except green. Hell, he even called me Hotspur, because I was blowing my stack all over the place. Could anybody face the husband of the woman he’d just beaten to death with an andiron—?”

“He could have,” she said. “Remember, I worked for him for almost a year, and women study men a lot more than men are ever aware of. George Clement has the most, perfect—I’d say absolute—control of his features of anybody I’ve ever seen. I don’t say he has that much control over his emotions—in fact, I know he hasn’t— but nothing inside shows through when he doesn’t want it to. It’s like pulling a blind. I’ve watched him in court when he was in trouble with a hostile witness and an unfriendly judge, and one time I hit him—”

“You
what
?”

She grinned. “All right, so I’ve been known to give way to a hot-headed impulse myself.”.

“But—but— what did you hit him for?”

“Well, it was a little ridiculous, actually, but at the moment that seemed the simplest way to get his hand out of my bra.”

“You can’t mean—not
George
?”

“I assure you, George has hands.”

I goggled at her. “Well, I’ll be damned; the sanctimonious old bastard. So that’s the reason you quit?”

“Yes. Not then, but later. He apologized for it, and I thought we understood each other, but all he did was change his approach. I finally got tired of knocking down passes, oblique or otherwise, and resigned. Naturally, I didn’t say anything about it when you asked, and wouldn’t now except that it has a bearing on this matter. In fact, I would say it was quite relevant. But we were talking about his ability to control his expression. Most men under the circumstances would have been angry and blustered it out, or looked sheepish, or tried to laugh their way out of it, or shown some expression. All he did was pull that blind in back of his face. Imagine, the red splotch on the side of it still showing, where I’d hit him, and he was as calm and poised as if he’d merely offered me a cigarette. ‘My apologies, Mrs. Ryan.’ He must have been raging inside—at me, and at himself for getting into a ridiculous position—but he went right on dictating without missing a comma.”

I was still having trouble assimilating it. “That changes the picture considerably. George
could
be the man we’re looking for.”

“Of course. Now, there’s one other item. Are you sure that Frances Kinnan came here from Florida?”

“Yes. There’s no doubt of it. Regardless of the fact that Crosby couldn’t pick up her trail down there, she came here from Miami. Her car had Dade County license plates, and she paid the first month’s rent on the store \ with a check on a Miami bank. She was lying about all the rest of it, but she’d been there, and she’d been using the name Frances Kinnan. She had to, because that was the name on the pink slip of the car. I sold it for her when we were married, and bought her that Mercedes.”

“You don’t recall the date on the slip? I mean, when she bought the car?”

“No. I didn’t even look at it. But why?”

“As I recall, she arrived here in January, 1959. Is that right?”

“Yes. It was two years ago this week.”

“Well, George had just come back from a Florida fishing trip, less than three weeks before.”

“What? Are you sure of that?”

“Positive. I’ve been thinking back very carefully, to make certain of it. I started work for him in November, 1958, and it was less than a month afterward. There were continuations on a couple of cases he had pending, and he got away for about a week, sometime after the middle of December. He came back just a few days before Christmas. And he was down there alone.”

“B
Y GOD, I THINK YOU’VE
got it!” I said. “So that was what those fishing trips were for? He always went alone; Fleurelle didn’t care for fishing—or for Florida, either.”

“Yes, I know,” she said simply. “I’ve been briefed on what Fleurelle didn’t like.”

“So you had the frigid wife bit thrown at you too?”

She nodded. “But it’s not important now. The thing that is, however, is the fact he could have met Frances Kinnan that trip—” She broke off, making a little grimace of distaste. “I don’t like this sort of thing.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “But it can’t be helped. So he met her, only this time he brought the girl home with him. And cooked up that dress shop deal to cover it. He knew about the living quarters in back of the store, and knew the place was vacant—it had been for a couple of months, in fact—” I stopped, realizing we still didn’t know the answer.

“What is it?” she asked.

“We’re as far in left field as ever. There’s no motive for murder in any of this. Take a look. Suppose Roberts did find out something about her—I mean, who she was —and she was paying him to keep it hushed up; it was still nothing to George. By that time she was married to me. She’d have been in a jam, and
my
face might have been a little red if it suddenly developed the police were looking for my wife because she’d absconded with the assets of some bank in Groundloop, Arizona, but they couldn’t pin anything on George, even if the details of this dress shop setup ever came out. He’s too shrewd a lawyer to get tagged with a charge of harboring a fugitive—he’d probably thought that all out in advance. He’d simply say he had no idea she was a fugitive, and even if she said otherwise, it’d only be her word against his. Admittedly, the scandal wouldn’t have helped his position much here in town, but anybody with George’s mind and legal training wouldn’t have much trouble weighing the risks of first-degree murder against a minor thing like that and coming up with the safe answer, even if he had no scruples against murder aside from the risk. Let Roberts talk, and be damned to him. And, finally, it’s doubtful Roberts even knew there was any connection between her and George. As far as Fleurelle is concerned, she might have divorced him if it all came out, but from my viewpoint that’d hardly qualify as a total disaster.”

“I know,” she said. “There has to be more to it than we’ve discovered.”

“Also, I still don’t think George could have killed her. There simply wasn’t enough time between my calling him and his showing up in the Sheriff’s office.”

“That we can check,” she said. “And we will in just a minute. But right now, let’s look at that Junior Delevan possibility again. I still have a feeling he fits into it somewhere; you can call it feminine intuition if you want, but there’s something very significant in that bitterness of Doris Bentley’s toward Frances. At first, I thought it might be because she believed you’d killed Roberts and of course blamed Frances for the fact. She probably still thinks you killed him, but I don’t think that’s what’s bothering her. She didn’t care that much about him. They dated a few times, but from what I can find out, that’s about all it amounted to. So we have to go back further. She was pretty crazy about Junior, from all accounts.

“I’ve been asking a few questions here and there, trying not to be too obvious about it, and I’ve learned just about all that was ever known or ever found out about what happened to Junior that night. And it’s not very much. Scanlon questioned Doris about him, along with a lot of other people, but she swears she never saw him at all. She had a date with him, but he stood her up.”

Something nebulous brushed against the perimeter of my mind. I tried to close in on it, but it got away. I must have grunted, because she stopped. “What?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I was just trying to remember something. Go on.”

“She could have been lying about not seeing him,” she went on, “but apparently Scanlon was satisfied she was telling the truth. It seems she even called Junior’s house, when he failed to show up for the date when the dress shop closed at nine
P.M
., trying to find out if his mother knew where he was. She—that is, Mrs. Delevan—verified this. She said Doris called there twice. There’s not much more to tell. They do know where Junior was until around eleven-thirty. He was with two other boys—Kenny Dowling and Chuck McKinstry—just riding around drinking beer. Dowling was old enough to buy it, so he was picking it up by the six-pack, and they were drinking it in the car. They told Scanlon he got out of the car on Clebourne, near Fuller’s, around eleven-thirty, saying he had important business to take care of and couldn’t spend the whole night with peasants. They thought he meant a girl, since he always swaggered a bit over his conquests, but he wouldn’t tell them her name. They swear that was the last they ever saw of him. Scanlon had them in his office for six hours—he had Dowling where the hair was short, anyway, for giving beer to minors— and when they came out they were pretty sick-looking boys, but they stuck to their story and said they had no idea where he was going or what he was going to do after he left them. Apparently that was the last time he was ever seen alive; he must have been killed in the next half hour. Somewhere.”