Find a Victim (16 page)

“Which one?”

“I’d rather not go into it. Exhuming corpses is an ugly business.”

The rebuff held her silent for a time. She looked out toward the lake, which glimmered like fragments of fallen sky between the trees.

“I suppose I asked for that,” she said. “You have been kind to me, though, last night, and again today. I can’t help wondering if it’s simply a technique. Is this your crimeside manner, Mr. Archer? Your psychological third-degree?”

There was enough truth in the question to make me wince. “I’m playing it as straight as I can with you. I don’t deny I’ve been tempted to use people, play on their feelings,
push them around. Those are the occupational diseases of my job.”

“And you don’t have them?”

“I have them.” Jo Summers changing smile wavered smokily behind my eyes. “This is a dirty business I’m in. All I can do is watch myself and keep it as clean as I can.” I felt as if she’d put me on the spot, and I changed the direction of the conversation: “What brought you up here, anyway?”

“I don’t know for certain. Perhaps I simply wanted to see you again.” She wouldn’t look at me. “Is that a dreadful confession for a woman to make to a man?”

“Dreadful. You shock me, Katie.”

“No, don’t make fun of me. There’s nothing funny about it. Brandon Church frightened me when I talked to him last night—this morning.”

“Did he make things unpleasant for you?”

“Not exactly. He didn’t accuse me of anything. But he seemed so different—not the man I knew at all. He hardly seemed to know me, he treated me like a stranger. I wondered if he was drugged, or losing his mind. And then the other one, the Spanish American deputy—”

“Braga?”

“Yes. Sal Braga. I heard him threaten your life. He said he would shoot you on sight, and Brandon didn’t even try to quiet him. Brandon didn’t say a word.”

“He probably likes the project.”

“But why? What’s happening to all of us?”

“That’s my problem. There are a few more questions I’d like to ask you.”

“About Brandon? He was one person I thought I knew. I don’t seem to know anyone, really.”

“About your husband and Anne Meyer, if you can stand talking about them.”

She answered after a pause, in a neutral tone: “I don’t mind.”

“All right. Were they still attached to each other?”

“I don’t believe so. He told me that he broke with her months ago. For once I think he was telling the truth. When I saw them together at the motor court, they didn’t act as if—” Her voice faded.

“As if they were still lovers?”

She nodded.

“Have you any idea why they broke off, assuming that they did?”

“I suppose he got tired of her—he tired of women very easily. Or she got bored with him.” There was a glint of malice in her eyes. “She was just as promiscuous as he was.”

“But they were still friendly after the break?”

“Apparently they were. She went on working for him, until last week.”

“You say she was promiscuous. How much do you know about her?”

“I know a good deal about Anne. So much that I can even feel sorry for her, when I’m not feeling sorry for myself. You see, I’ve known her ever since we were in high school together. I’m only two or three years older than she is. Anne had a bad reputation even then.”

“In high school?”

“Yes, she started young. She was one of the boy-crazy ones, very pretty and very wild. It wasn’t entirely her own fault. She grew up terribly fast. She was a full-grown woman before she was fifteen. And she had no decent home life. Her mother was dead, and her father was a bestial man. Really bestial.”

“You sound as if you made a study of them.”

“Father did,” she said surprisingly. “He was deeply concerned
about Anne and her family, and he discussed it with me. He was judge of the Juvenile Court as well as Superior Court, and he had the disposition of the case. He had to decide what was to be done with Anne after it happened.”

“What did happen?”

She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Her father assaulted her.”

“Do you mean what I think you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Why isn’t Meyer in San Quentin?”

“She wouldn’t testify against him in court. Of course she was the only witness, so they had no case. But they did have enough to take her away from him, out of his house. Father intended to put her in a foster home, but it turned out not to be necessary. Brandon married her sister—he was Juvenile Officer in those days—and the two of them took her in. She lived with them for several years, and it seems to have worked out. There was no more trouble with Anne, no more legal trouble anyway.”

“Until now.”

She twisted suddenly in the seat and looked up the lane toward the hidden cabin. Her half-turned body made a breathtaking line against the light.

“Won’t you come up to the cabin with me?”

“What for?”

“I want to see what sort of condition it’s in. I intend to sell it.”

“You better stay out of there.”

“Why? Is her body—?”

“Nothing like that. You simply wouldn’t like it in there. In fact you’d better give me back the keys.”

“I don’t understand why.” But she took the keyring out of her black suède bag and handed it to me. “What do you want them for?”

“I’ll turn them over to the authorities if I can find an honest cop in Las Cruces. You should know some honest cops, if your father was a judge.”

“I thought Brandon was one. I still believe he is, when he’s himself.” She bit her lip. “Why don’t you go to Sam Westmore?”

“The District Attorney?”

“Yes. Sam and Marion are my oldest friends. You can rely on Sam Westmore.” But she was holding onto the door-handle again, as if she needed it to anchor her to reality. “Is it safe, though, for you to go back to the city?”

“I don’t know if it’s safe. It should be interesting.”

She said in a small, clear voice: “You’re a brave man, aren’t you?”

“Not brave. Merely stubborn. I don’t like to see the jerks and hustlers get away with too much. Or they might take over entirely.”

“You won’t let them, will you?”

Her voice was dreamy, almost childish. Her gentian eyes were wide and dewy. They closed. I took her head between my hands and kissed her mouth.

Her hat fell off, but she didn’t try to retrieve it. Her head rested on my shoulder like a ruffled golden bird. Her breast leaned on me, and I could feel the quickened movement of her breathing.

“You’ll stop them,” she said.

“If they don’t stop me first, Katie.”

“How did you know my name was Katie? Nobody’s called me Katie for a long time.”

I didn’t answer. An explanation would only spoil the moment.

It ended anyway. She stiffened and drew back. When I tried to reach her mouth again, she turned her head away.

“God,” she said harshly. “I need a keeper, don’t I? I warned you not to be sympathetic to me. I’m ready to weep on any shoulder that offers itself.”

The red convertible followed me down the mountain. I kept remembering the taste of her mouth.

CHAPTER
19
:
I found Meyer in a cubicle in the
corner of his warehouse, sitting idle at an invoice-strewn desk. He looked at my face as if the sight of it hurt his red-rimmed eyeballs.

“What happened to you?”

“I cut myself shaving.”

“What were you using, a power mower? I was commencing to think you ran out on me. Which maybe you should of at that. Brand wants me to take you off the case.”

“So?”

“So nothing. I don’t take orders from any young snot-nose that I helped to put in the courthouse with my good money.” Meyer leaned forward on his arms, his face like the graying mask of an old fox. “Only I wouldn’t do anything more to cross him if I was you. Brand is a bad one to cross.”

“I don’t take it so well myself.”

“Maybe not.” He squinted ironically at my damaged face. “But you’re not sheriff. Now where you been?”

“Lake Perdida.”

“Why go traipsing off there? I been trying to contact you all day, and I’m not the only one. The D.A. wants to see you. While you’ve been pooping off around the countryside, this case has been breaking open. You know the Buick that got left at the airbase—”

“I ought to. I was the one who reported it.”

“Anyway, they traced it to a car-dealer in Los Angeles. This redhead—what’s his name?”

“Bozey.”

“This Bozey bought it off a used-car lot around the first of September. He paid cash for it, a five-hundred-dollar bill and some smaller bills. When the dealer tried to deposit the money in his bank, the cashier caught it.”

“Hot?”

“It scorched his fingers. The money was part of the loot from a bank in Portland that got robbed last August. The bank in L.A. had a circular from the Oregon police listing the numbers of the bills. It was a big haul, over twenty thousand bucks altogether.”

“Bozey took a bank for twenty grand?”

Meyer nodded his shaggy head. “There’s a two-thousand-dollar reward out for the redhead. That should keep you on the ball. If anything will. What sent you up to the lake, for God’s sake? Maybe you thought you’d get in a little fishing on my time?”

I almost walked out on him. One thing kept me: I needed more time with Meyer.

“Call it fishing. I caught something.” I laid the scuffed brown heel on the desk. “Does this belong to your daughter Anne?”

He turned it over in his fingers, gently, as if it possessed a feminine sensitivity. “I wouldn’t know if it’s Annie’s or not. I never paid much attention to what a woman wears. Where did it come from?”

I told him.

“That don’t sound so good for Annie.” He rolled the heel on the desk like a misshapen dice. “What do you make of it?”

I leaned on a bookkeeper’s stool against the wall and lit a cigarette. “I have a hunch that she was digging a grave. It could have been intended for her, or somebody else.”

“Who else? Kerrigan?”

“Not Kerrigan. He was superintending the job.”

“It don’t make sense to me. Are you sure it was Annie with him?”

“I have a couple of witnesses. Neither of them made a positive identification, but I think they’re just being cautious. If this heel is hers, it clinches it.”

He picked it up from the litter on the desk, and scratched his stubbly chin with the exposed nails. The sound rasped on my nerve-ends.

“Hilda would know, maybe.”

He reached for the telephone and dialed a number. On the plywood wall behind his head the end of an old motto protruded from under a bright new girlie calendar:

Meyer spoke into the mouthpiece: “Hello, Brand, is Hilda around?”

The telephone squawked negatively.

“Know where she is?”

The sheriff’s voice was denatured by its passage through the wires, but recognizable: “No. I don’t.” His voice sank, and I missed the rest of what he said.

Meyer listened with a lengthening face. “Well, what do you know about that? Personally I think she’s making a big mistake, and I’ll tell her that if I see her.” He dropped the receiver. “Brand says she’s gone and left him. Packed her clothes and moved out.”

“Did he say why?”

“Not him. But I happen to know they never did get along too well together. She used to say he treated her
cruel, before she stopped talking about it.” There was a queer little smile on Meyer’s mouth, half anxious and half mocking. The in-law relationship usually cut two ways.

“Cruel?”

“I don’t mean he beat her, anyway not where it showed. Mental cruelty was what she complained of. He must of been a Tartar at that, to make her want to kill herself.”

“She tried to kill herself?”

“That’s right. She took a handful of sleeping-pills, way back when they were first married. Brand tried to cover up and pass it off as an accident, but I got the truth of it from Annie. Annie was with them in those days.”

“What made her want to do it?”

“I guess he made her life so miserable that she couldn’t stand it. I don’t know. I never understood any woman, let alone my own girls. I never could talk to either of them. I say black, they say white—that’s the way it’s always been.”

His raw and broken sentimentality depressed me. The barren little office was stifling hot, and I felt as if I’d been trapped in it for hours.

“Where do you think she is?”

“Search me.”

“You could try your house.”

“Yeah,” he said dubiously.

He picked up the receiver and dialed again. At the other end of the line the telephone chirped like a tired cricket.

“Hilda? Is that you? What the hell are you doing there? —No, hold it. I want to talk to you. And Archer has something to show you. Well be right over.”

I followed his Lincoln across town and parked in the drive beside his private junkyard. The house was even uglier by daylight, a peeling yellow face with blinded windows, surrounded by a wild green hair of eucalyptus trees. If Hilda Church had traded her marriage in on this,
there was something very wrong with the marriage.

She opened the screen door for us. Meyer looked her up and down and brushed in past her without a word.

“How are you, Mr. Archer?”

“I could be better. I have been worse. And you?”

“I’m perfectly all right. Thank you.” But she looked as though she had spent a bad night. Her green eyes were dusky and vague, and there were bluish patches under them. She smiled with false brightness. “Please come in.”

She led me into the living-room, walking with obvious hesitancy. She reminded me of a small girl moving awkwardly in a body that had outgrown her, threatened by the sharp corners of the world.

I sat on the old davenport across from the fireplace. Its ashes had been cleaned out. The entire room had been swept and dusted and set in order. Meyer didn’t seem to notice. She looked at him reproachfully, wiping her nervous white hands on her apron front.

“I’ve been cleaning the house for you, Father.”

He answered without looking at her: “You don’t have to stay here and do for me. You’ll be better off in the long run if you go home and look after your husband.”