The Galton Case (7 page)

“How did you get hooked up with him?”

“I was a dreamer, too, I guess you’d say. I thought I could straighten him out, make a man of him. That all he needed was the love of a good woman. I wasn’t a good woman, and I don’t pretend to be. But I was better than he was.”

“Where did you meet?”

“In the San Francisco Hospital where I was working. I was a nurse’s aide, and Pete was in the ward with a broken nose and a couple of broken ribs. He got beaten up in a gang fight.”

“A gang fight?”

“That’s all I know. Pete just said it was some rumble on the docks. I should have taken warning, but after he got out of the hospital I went on seeing him. He was young and good-looking, and like I said I thought he had the makings of a man. So I married him—the big mistake of my life, and I’ve made some doozies.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Nineteen-thirty-six. That dates me, doesn’t it? But I was only twenty-one at the time.” She paused, and raised her eyes to my face. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I’ve never told a living soul in my life. Why don’t you stop me?”

“I’m hoping you’ll tell me something that will help. Did your husband go in for gambling?”

“Please don’t call him that. I married Pete Culligan, but he was no husband to me.” She lifted her head. “I have a real husband now. Incidentally, he’ll be expecting me back to make his dinner.” She leaned forward in her chair and started to get up.

“Can’t you give me a few minutes more, Mrs. Matheson? I’ve told you all I know about Peter—”

She laughed shortly. “If I told you all
I
know, it would take all night. Okay, a few more minutes, if you promise me there won’t be any publicity. My husband and me have a position to keep up. I’m a member of the PTA, the League of Women Voters.”

“There won’t be any publicity. Was he a gambler?”

“As much as he could afford to be. But he was always small-time.”

“This money he said he made in Reno—did he tell you how he made it?”

“Not a word. But I don’t think it was gambling. He was never that lucky.”

“Do you still have his letter?”

“Certainly not. I burned it, the same day I got it.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t want it around the house. I felt like it was dirt tracked into the house.”

“Was Culligan a crook, or a hustler?”

“Depends what you mean by that.” Her eyes were wary.

“Did he break the law?”

“I guess everybody does from time to time.”

“Was he ever arrested?”

“Yeah. Mostly for drunk and disorderly, nothing serious.”

“Did he carry a gun?”

“Not when I was with him. I wouldn’t let him.”

“But the issue came up?”

“I didn’t say that.” She was becoming evasive. “I meant I wouldn’t let him even if he wanted to.”

“Did he own a gun?”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said.

I’d almost lost her. She wasn’t talking frankly or willingly any more. So I threw her the question I didn’t expect her to answer, hoping to gather something from her reaction to it:

“You mentioned an L. Bay in your letter to Culligan. What happened there?”

Her lips were pushed out stiff and pale, as if they were made of bone. The dark eyes seemed to shrink in her head:

“I don’t know what makes you ask that.” The tip of her tongue moved along her upper lip, and she tried again: “What was that about a bay in my letter? I don’t remember any bay in my letter.”

“I do, Mrs. Matheson.” I quoted: “ ‘I could make trouble for you, double trouble. Remember L. Bay.’ ”

“If I said that, I don’t know what I meant.”

“There’s a place called Luna Bay about twenty-five or thirty miles from here.”

“Is there?” she said stupidly.

“You know it. What did Pete Culligan do there?”

“I don’t remember. It must have been some dirty trick he played on me.” She was a poor liar, as most honest people are. “Does it matter?”

“It seems to matter to you. Did you and Pete live in Luna Bay?”

“I guess you could call it living. I had a job there, doing practical nursing.”

“When?”

“Way back when. I don’t remember what year.”

“Who were you working for?”

“Some people. I don’t remember their name.” She leaned toward me urgently, her eyes pointed like flints. “You have that letter with you?”

“I left it where I found it, in Culligan’s suitcase in the house where he worked. Why?”

“I want it back. I wrote it, and it belongs to me.”

“You may have to take that up with the police. It’s probably in their hands by now.”

“Will they be coming here?” She looked behind her, and all around the crowded restaurant, as if she expected to find a policeman bearing down on her.

“It depends on how soon they catch the killer. They may have him already, in which case they won’t bother with secondary leads. Do you have any idea who it was, Mrs. Matheson?”

“How could I? I haven’t seen Pete in ten years, I told you.”

“What happened in Luna Bay?”

“Change the record, can’t you? If anything happened, which I can’t remember, it was strictly between me and Pete. Nothing to do with anybody else, understand?”

Her voice and looks were altering under pressure. She seemed to have broken through into a lower stratum of experience and a coarser personality. And she knew it. She pulled her purse toward her and held on to it with both hands. It was a good purse, beautifully cut from genuine
lizard. In contrast with it, her hands were rough, their knuckles swollen and cracked by years of work.

She raised her eyes to mine. I caught the red reflection of fear in their centers. She was afraid of me, and she was afraid to leave me.

“Mrs. Matheson, Peter Culligan was murdered today—”

“You expect me to go into mourning?”

“I expect you to give me any information that might have a bearing on his death.”

“I already did. You can leave me alone, understand? You’re not getting me mixed up in no murder. Any murder.”

“Did you ever hear of a man named Anthony Galton?”

“No.”

“John Brown?”

“No.”

I could see the bitter forces of her will gathering in her face. She exerted them, and got up, and walked away from me and her fear.

I
WENT
back to the telephone booths and looked up the name Chad Bolling in the Bay Area directories. I didn’t expect to find it, after more than twenty years, but I was still running in luck. Bolling had a Telegraph Hill address. I immured myself in one of the booths and called him.

A woman’s voice answered: “This is the Bolling residence.”

“Is Mr. Bolling available?”

“Available for what?” she said abruptly.

“It has to do with magazine publication of a poem. The name is Archer,” I added, trying to sound like a wealthy editor.

“I see.” She softened her tone. “I don’t know where Chad is at the moment. And I’m afraid he won’t be home for dinner. I do know he’ll be at The Listening Ear later this evening.”

“The Listening Ear?”

“It’s a new night club. Chad’s giving a reading there tonight. If you’re interested in poetry, you owe it to yourself to catch it.”

“What time does he go on?”

“I think ten.”

I rented a car and drove it up Bayshore to the city, where I parked it under Union Square. Above the lighted towers of the hotels, twilight had thickened into darkness. A damp chill had risen from the sea; I could feel it through my clothes. Even the colored lights around the square had a chilly look.

I bought a pint of whisky to ward off the chill and checked in at the Salisbury, a small side-street hotel where I usually stayed in San Francisco. The desk clerk was new to me. Desk clerks are always moving up or down. This one was old and on his way down; his sallow face drooped in the pull of gravity. He handed me my key reluctantly:

“No luggage, sir?”

I showed him my bottle in its paper bag. He didn’t smile.

“My car was stolen.”

“That’s too bad.” His eyes were sharp and incredulous behind fussy little pince-nez. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to pay in advance.”

“All right.” I gave him the five dollars and asked for a receipt.

The bellhop who took me up in the old open ironwork elevator
had been taking me up in the same elevator for nearly twenty years. We shook hands. His was crumpled by arthritis.

“How are you, Coney?”

“Fine, Mr. Archer, fine. I’m taking a new pill, phenyl-buta-something. It’s doing wonders for me.”

He stepped out and did a little soft-shoe step to prove it. He’d once been half of a brother act that played the Orpheum circuit. He danced me down the corridor to the door of my room.

“What brings you up to the City?” he said when we were inside. To San Franciscans, there’s only one city.

“I flew up for a little entertainment.”

“I thought Hollywood was the world’s center of entertainment.”

“I’m looking for something different,” I said. “Have you heard of a new club called The Listening Ear?”

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t like it.” He shook his white head. “I hope you didn’t come all the way up here for
that.”

“What’s the matter with it?”

“It’s a culture cave. One of these bistros where guys read poems to music. It ain’t your speed at all.”

“My taste is becoming more elevated.”

His grin showed all his remaining teeth. “Don’t kid an old man, eh?”

“Ever hear of Chad Bolling?”

“Sure. He promotes a lot of publicity for himself.” Coney looked at me anxiously. “You really going in for the poetry kick, Mr. Archer? With music?”

“I have long yearned for the finer things.”

Such as a good French dinner at a price I could pay. I took a taxi to the Ritz Poodle Dog, and had a good French dinner. When I finished eating, it was nearly ten o’clock.

The Listening Ear was full of dark blue light and pale blue music. A combo made up of piano, bass fiddle, trumpet,
and drums was playing something advanced. I didn’t have my slide rule with me, but the four musicians seemed to understand each other. From time to time they smiled and nodded like space jockeys passing in the night.

The man at the piano seemed to be the head technician. He smiled more distantly than the others, and when the melody had been done to death, he took the applause with more exquisite remoteness. Then he bent over his keyboard again like a mad scientist.

The tight-hipped waitress who brought my whisky-and-water was interchangeable with nightclub girls anywhere. Even her parts looked interchangeable. But the audience was different from other nightclub crowds. Most of them were young people with serious expressions on their faces. A high proportion of the girls had short straight hair through which they ran their fingers from time to time. Many of the boys had longer hair than the girls, but they didn’t run their fingers through it so much. They stroked their beards instead.

Another tune failed to survive the operation, and then the lights went up. A frail-looking middle-aged man in a dark suit sidled through the blue curtains at the rear of the room. The pianist extended his hand and assisted him onto the bandstand. The audience applauded. The frail-looking man, by way of a bow, allowed his chin to subside on the big black bow tie which blossomed on his shirt front. The applause rose to a crescendo.

“I give you Mr. Chad Bolling,” the pianist said. “Master of all the arts, singer of songs to be sung, painter of pictures, hepcat, man of letters. Mr. Chad Bolling.”

The clapping went on for a while. The poet lifted his hand as if in benediction, and there was silence.

“Thank you, friends,” he said. “With the support of my brilliant young friend Fingers Donahue, I wish to bring to you tonight, if my larynx will permit, my latest poem.” His
mouth twisted sideways as if in self-mockery. “It ain’t chopped liver.”

He paused. The instruments began to murmur behind him. Bolling took a roll of manuscript out of his inside breast pocket and unrolled it under the light.

“ ‘Death Is Tabu,’ ” he said, and began to chant in a hoarse carrying voice that reminded me of a carnival spieler. He said that at the end of the night he sat in wino alley where the angels drink canned heat, and that he heard a beat. It seemed a girl came to the mouth of the alley and asked him what he was doing in death valley. “ ‘Death is the ultimate crutch,’ she said,” he said. She asked him to come home with her to bed.

He said that sex was the ultimate crutch, but he turned out to be wrong. It seemed he heard a gong. She fled like a ghost, and he was lost, at the end of the end of the night.

While the drummer and the bass fiddler made shock waves on the roof, Bolling raised his voice and began to belt it out. About how he followed her up and down and around and underground, up Russian Hill and Nob Hill and Telegraph Hill and across the Bay Bridge and back by way of the Oakland ferry. So he found the sphinx on Market Street cadging drinks and they got tight and danced on the golden asphalt of delight.

Eventually she fell upon her bed. “I’m star-transfixed,” she said. He drank the canned hell of her lips, and it went on like that for quite a while, while the music tittered and moaned. She finally succeeded in convincing him that death was the ultimate crutch, whatever that meant. She knew, because it happened she was dead. “Good night, mister,” she said, or he said she said. “Good night, sister,” he said.

The audience waited to make sure that Bolling was finished, then burst into a surge of clapping, interspersed with
bravos
and
ole’s.
Bolling stood with pursed lips and absorbed
it like a little boy sucking soda pop through a straw. While the lower part of his face seemed to be enjoying itself, his eyes were puzzled. His mouth stretched in a clownish grin:

“Thanks, cats. I’m glad you dig me. Now dig this.”

He read a poem about the seven blind staggers of the soul, and one about the beardless wonders on the psycho wards who were going to be the
gurus
of the new truth. At this point I switched off my hearing aid, and waited for it to be over. It took a long time. After the reading there were books to be autographed, questions to be answered, drinks to be drunk.