The Chill (22 page)

“When a woman is murdered, you ask her estranged husband where he was at the time. It’s the corollary of
cherchez la femme.”

“Well, you have my answer. Check it out if you like. But you’ll save yourself time and trouble simply by believing me. I’ve been completely frank with you—inordinately frank.”

“I appreciate that.”

“But then you turn around and accuse me—”

“A question isn’t an accusation, Mr. Haggerty.”

“It carried that implication,” he said in an aggrieved and
slightly nagging tone. “I thought the man in Reno was your suspect.”

“He’s one of them.”

“And I’m another?”

“Let’s drop it, shall we?”

“You brought it up.”

“Now I’m dropping it. Getting back to the man in Reno, can you remember his name?”

“I was introduced to him, of course, but I don’t recall his surname. The women called him Jud. I’m not sure whether it was a given name or a nickname.”

“Why did you refer to him as Mrs. Burke’s alleged brother?”

“They didn’t strike me as brother and sister. They acted toward each other more like—oh—intimate friends who were simply going along with Helen’s gag. I intercepted a couple of knowing glances, for example.”

“Will you describe the man in detail for me?”

“I’ll try. My visual memory isn’t too good. I’m strictly the verbal type.”

But under repeated questions, he built up an image of the man: age about thirty-two or -three, height just under six feet, weight about 175; muscular and active, good-looking in an undistinguished way; thinning black hair, brown eyes, no scars. He had worn a light gray silk or imitation silk suit and pointed low black shoes in the Italian style. Haggerty had gathered that the man Jud worked in some undetermined capacity for one of the gambling clubs in the Reno-Tahoe area.

It was time I went to Reno. I looked at my watch: nearly eleven
:
and remembered that I would gain time on the flight west. I could still have a talk with Luke Deloney’s widow, if she was available, and get to Reno at a reasonable hour.

I went into the house with Haggerty, called O’Hare Airport, and made a reservation on a late afternoon flight. Then I called Mrs. Deloney. She was at home, and would see me.

Bert Haggerty offered to drive me out to her house. I told
him he’d better stay with his father-in-law. Hoffman’s snores were sounding through the house like muffled lamentations, but he could wake up at any time and go on the rampage.

G
LENVIEW
A
VENUE
wound through the north side of the north side, in a region of estates so large that it almost qualified as country. Trees lined the road and sometimes met above it. The light that filtered through their turning leaves onto the great lawns was the color of sublimated money.

I turned in between the brick gate-posts of 103 and shortly came in sight of an imposing old red brick mansion. The driveway led to a brick-columned
porte-cochère
on the right. I was hardly out of my car when a Negro maid in uniform opened the door.

“Mr. Archer?”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Deloney is expecting you, in the downstairs sitting-room.”

She was sitting by a window looking out on a countryside where red sumac blazed among less brilliant colors. Her hair was white, and bobbed short. Her blue silk suit looked like Lily Daché. Her face was a mass of wrinkles but its fine bones remained in all their delicacy. She was handsome in the way an antique object can be handsome without regard to the condition of the materials. Her mind must have been very deep in the past, because she didn’t notice us until the maid spoke.

“Mr. Archer is here, Mrs. Deloney.”

She rose with the ease of a younger woman, putting down
a book she was holding. She gave me her hand and a long look. Her eyes were the same color as her blue silk suit, unfaded and intelligent.

“So you’ve come all the way from California to see me. You must be disappointed.”

“On the contrary.”

“You don’t need to flatter me. When I was twenty I looked like everybody else. Now I’m past seventy, I look like myself. It’s a liberating fact. But do sit down. This chair is the most comfortable. My father Senator Osborne preferred it to any other.”

She indicated a red leather armchair polished and dark with use. The chair she sat in opposite me was a ladderbacked rocker with worn cushions attached to it. The rest of the furnishings in the room were equally old and unpretentious, and I wondered if she used it as a place to keep the past.

“You’ve had a journey,” she reminded herself. “Can I give you something to eat or drink?”

“No thanks.”

She dismissed the maid. “I’m afraid you’re going to be doubly disappointed. I can add very little to the official account of my husband’s suicide. Luke and I hadn’t been in close touch for some time before it occurred.”

“You already have added something,” I said. “According to the official account it was an accident.”

“So it was. I’d almost forgotten. It was thought best to omit the fact of suicide from the public reports.”

“Who thought it best?”

“I did, among others. Given my late husband’s position in the state, his suicide was bound to have business and political repercussions. Not to mention the personal ugliness.”

“Some people might think it was uglier to alter the facts of a man’s death.”

“Some people might think it,” she said with a
grande dame
expression. “Not many of them would say it in my presence.
In any case the fact was not altered, only the report of it. I’ve had to live with the fact of my husband’s suicide.”

“Are you perfectly certain that it is a fact?”

“Perfectly.”

“I’ve just been talking to the man who handled the case, Lieutenant Hoffman. He says your husband shot himself by accident while he was cleaning an automatic pistol.”

“That was the story we agreed upon. Lieutenant Hoffman naturally sticks to it. I see no point in your trying to change it at this late date.”

“Unless Mr. Deloney was murdered. Then there would be some point.”

“No doubt, but he was
not
murdered.” Her eyes came up to mine, and they hadn’t changed, except that they may have become a little harder.

“I’ve heard rumors that he was, as far away as California.”

“Who’s been spreading such nonsense?”

“Lieutenant Hoffman’s daughter Helen. She claimed she knew a witness to the killing. The witness may have been herself.”

The insecurity that had touched her face changed into cold anger. “She has no right to tell such lies. I’ll have her stopped!”

“She’s been stopped,” I said. “Somebody stopped her Friday night, with a gun. Which is why I’m here.”

“I see. Where in California was she killed?”

“Pacific Point. It’s on the coast south of Los Angeles.”

Her eyes flinched, ever so slightly. “I’m afraid I never heard of it. I’m naturally sorry that the girl is dead, though I never knew her. But I can assure you that her death had nothing to do with Luke. You’re barking up the wrong tree, Mr. Archer.”

“I wonder.”

“There’s no need to. My husband wrote me a note before he shot himself which made the whole thing very clear. Detective Hoffman brought it to me himself. No one knew it
existed except him and his superiors. I hadn’t intended to tell you.”

“Why?”

“Because it was ugly. In effect he blamed me and my family for what he intended to do. He was in financial hot water, he’d been gambling in stocks and other things, his business was overextended. We refused to help him, for reasons both personal and practical. His suicide was an attempt to strike back at us. It succeeded, even though we altered the facts, as you put it.” She touched her flat chest. “I was hurt, as I was meant to be.”

“Was Senator Osborne alive at the time?”

“I’m afraid you don’t know your history,” she chided me. “My father died on December 14, 1936, three-and-a-half years before my husband killed himself. At least my father was spared that humiliation.”

“You referred to family.”

“I meant my sister Tish and my late Uncle Scott, the guardian of our trust. He and I were responsible for refusing further assistance to Luke. The decision was essentially mine. Our marriage had ended.”

“Why?”

“The usual reason, I believe. I don’t care to discuss it” She rose and went to the window and stood there straight as a soldier looking out. “A number of things ended for me in 1940. My marriage, and then my husband’s life, and then my sister’s. Tish died in the summer of that same year, and I cried for her all that fall. And now it’s fall again,” she said with a sigh. “We used to ride together in the fall. I taught her to ride when she was five years old and I was ten. That was before the turn of the century.”

Her mind was wandering off into remoter and less painful times. I said:

“Forgive me for laboring the point, Mrs. Deloney, but I have to ask you if that suicide note still exists.”

She turned, trying to smooth the marks of grief from her face. They persisted. Of course not. I burned it. You can take my word as to its contents.”

“It isn’t your word that concerns me so much. Are you absolutely certain your husband wrote it?”

“Yes. I couldn’t be mistaken about his handwriting.”

“A clever forgery can fool almost anybody.”

“That’s absurd. You’re talking the language of melodrama.”

“We live it every day, Mrs. Deloney.”

“But who would forge a suicide note?”

“It’s been done, by other murderers.”

She flung back her white head and looked at me down her delicate curved nose. She resembled a bird, even in the sound of her voice:

“My husband was not murdered.”

“It seems to me you’re resting a great deal of weight on a single handwritten note which might have been forged.”

“It was not forged. I know that by internal evidence. It referred to matters that only Luke and I were privy to.”

“Such as?”

“I have no intention of telling you, or anyone. Besides, Luke had been talking for months about killing himself, especially when he was in his cups.”

“You said you hadn’t been close to him for months.”

“No, but I got reports, from mutual friends.”

“Was Hoffman one of them?”

“Hardly. I didn’t consider him a friend.”

“Yet he hushed up your husband’s suicide for you. Your husband’s alleged suicide.”

“He was ordered to. He had no choice.”

“Who gave the order?”

“Presumably the Commissioner of Police. He
was
a friend of mine, and a friend of Luke’s.”

“And that made it all right for him to order the falsification of records?”

“It’s done every day,” she said, “in every city in the land. Spare me your moralizing, Mr. Archer. Commissioner Robertson is long since dead. The case itself is a dead issue.”

“Maybe it is to you. It’s very much on Hoffman’s mind. His daughter’s murder revived it.”

“I’m sorry for both of them. But I can’t very well alter the past to accommodate some theory you may have. What are you trying to prove, Mr. Archer?”

“Nothing specific. I’m trying to find out what the dead woman meant when she said that Bridgeton had caught up with her.”

“No doubt she meant something quite private and personal. Women usually do. But as I said, I never knew Helen Hoffman.”

“Was she involved with your husband?”

“No. She was not. And please don’t ask me how I can be sure. We’ve scratched enough at Luke’s grave, don’t you think? There’s nothing hidden there but a poor suicide. I helped to put him there, in a way.”

“By cutting off his funds?”

“Precisely. You didn’t think I was confessing to shooting him?”

“No,” I said. “Would you like to?”

Her face crinkled up in a rather savage smile. “Very well. I shot him. What do you propose to do about it?”

“Nothing. I don’t believe you.”

“Why would I say it if it wasn’t true?” She was playing the kind of fantastic girlish game old women sometimes revert to.

“Maybe you wanted to shoot your husband. I have no doubt you did want to. But if you actually had, you wouldn’t be talking about it.”

“Why not? There’s nothing you could possibly do. I have too many good friends in this city, official and otherwise. Who incidentally would be greatly disturbed if you persisted in stirring up that old mess.”

“Am I to take that as a threat?”

“No, Mr. Archer,” she said with her tight smile, “I have nothing against you except that you’re a zealot in your trade, or do you call it a profession? Does it really matter so much how people died? They’re dead, as we all shall be, sooner or later. Some of us sooner. And I feel I’ve given you enough of my remaining time on earth.”

She rang for the maid.

I
STILL HAD TIME
for another try at Earl Hoffman. I drove back toward his house, through downtown streets depopulated by the Sabbath. The questions Mrs. Deloney had raised, or failed to answer, stuck in my mind like fishhooks which trailed their broken lines into the past.

I was almost certain Deloney hadn’t killed himself, by accident or intent. I was almost certain somebody else had, and that Mrs. Deloney knew it. As for the suicide note, it could have been forged, it could have been invented, it could have been misread or misremembered. Hoffman would probably know which.

As I turned into Cherry Street, I saw a man in the next block walking away from me. He had on a blue suit and he moved with the heavy forcefulness of an old cop, except that every now and then he staggered and caught himself. I saw when I got closer that it was Hoffman. The orange cuffs of his pajama legs hung below his blue trousers.

I let him stay ahead of me, through slums that became more blighted as we went south. We entered a Negro district. The
adult men and women on the sidewalk gave Hoffman a wide berth. He was walking trouble.

He wasn’t walking too well. He stumbled and fell on his hands and knees by a gap-toothed picket fence. Some children came out from behind the fence and followed him, prancing and hooting, until he turned on them with upraised arms. He turned again and went on.