Wife or Death (17 page)

Denton arranged for a cab to pick him up at 7:30 A.M.

He went back to Angel's bedroom. Funny, he thought, how little sense of loss he felt. The bedrooms of the freshly dead were supposed to give off the effluvium of the vanished personality, a subtle spoor to trouble the living. This room did nothing of the sort. It was more like a storeroom, a mere place of things, things that had belonged to a faceless stranger.

He wandered over to the closet and opened the door and stood surveying her clothes. I'll have to dispose of them, he thought. Give them away. But to whom? He could always, of course, donate them to some organization, domestic or foreign. Or did he have to hold on to them? There was the question of her estate, such as it was … He smiled without joy. He had long ago fixed that, when he first realized just what he had married. Nothing was in Angel's name; no part of anything. So all she had left in the world was her personal belongings. I'll have to see a lawyer, he thought vaguely, and find out how to proceed; but meanwhile I'm going to get rid of these damn things—why should I continue to live with them? If there's any legal tangle, I can always make up the value in cash.

That was when he remembered the Koblowskis. Of course!

Three minutes later he was listening to a telephone ring somewhere in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Then it stopped and a tired voice with a faint European accent said, “Hello?”

“Mrs. Koblowski?”

“Yes?”

“This is Jim Denton.” He hesitated. “Angel's husband.”

“Oh!” He thought the swift intake of breath at the other end of the line was the result of fear. He was sure of it when she said in a much lower, almost furtive, tone, “Yes. Yes, Mr. Denton …”

“Mrs. Koblowski, I have all this clothing and stuff of Angel's … Would you be able to use them? Like me to send them to you? I know you have a number of grown daughters—”

“I—” She stopped, this time with an unmistakably frightened gasp. He heard a gruff male voice asking something in a foreign language. Polish, no doubt. And her quavering reply. And then the man was speaking to him in accented English. “Mr. Denton, I am Stanislaus Koblowski. We thank you. But we want nothing from
her
.” And the click in his ear made Denton hang up.

There was a man with a one-track mind, he thought, and shrugged.

Corinne? She was only a bit smaller than Angel; the stuff ought to fit her. But then he shook his head, imagining what Ellen Wright and Olive Haber would make out of Corinne's wearing Angel's clothes.

Denton was still chewing on the problem along with his breakfast the next morning when Bridget White arrived.

Bridget! She herself was out—those shoulders of hers would explode the seams of anything Angel had been able to wear. But …

“Bridget, I'm trying to clean out my wife's clothing. Know anyone who wears her size?”

“Do I!” The cleaning woman's broad face split in a grin. “I got a teenage daughter no bigger than Mrs. Denton was. I saw your wife two or three times at houses where I was cleaning.”

Don't look a gift horse under the tail, Denton thought. Aloud, he said with relief, “That's fine. Suppose you go through the closet and bureau drawers and lay out on the bed some things you think your daughter can use. I'll look them over tonight, and you can take them tomorrow.”

“I sure appreciate that, Mr. Denton. My Elsie can use any clothes she can get.”

Tim MacPherson himself showed up in the cab at 7:15. He was a weatherbeaten man in his late fifties with a lipless mouth and unsmiling eyes. His greatest asset as a taxi driver in Denton's view was his taciturnity; he rarely uttered an unnecessary word.

“Where to, Mr. Denton?”

“
Clarion
, Mac.”

That was the extent of their conversation until Denton got out in the square. Then MacPherson grunted, “Sixty-five cents,” which was the zone rate, Denton handed him a dollar bill, MacPherson returned three dimes and a nickel and drove off. Nobody tipped in Ridgemore.

Thank God for the Scots, Denton thought piously, and unlocked the door. The pile of mail under the slot was unusually large. Denton gathered it up and made for his desk.

He was slitting open envelopes when Amos Case trudged in.

“Morning, Jim.”

“Morning, Amos.” Denton slit the last of the envelopes open, nodded glumly, and slammed its enclosure on top of a separate pile. “Well, that makes thirty-four.”

“Thirty-four what?”

“Subscription cancellations. In one morning! Amos, what do you hear around town?”

“Gossip,” the printer said.

“About me?”

“Nobody else, Jim.”

“Do you believe it?”

Amos looked thoughtful. Finally he asked, “Which part?”

Denton exploded. “Don't tell me you think I killed my wife, too!”

“Don't say I do, don't say I don't.”

“Oh, you're not sure!”

“Let me put it this way, Jim,” the old printer said with a shrug. “If you did, you had your reasons.”

“Well, I didn't!”

He looked relieved. “Glad to hear you say that, Jim. Didn't want to come right out and ask.” And old Amos walked over to hang his coat and hat on the clothestree. Without another word he slipped into his inkstained coveralls and headed for the press room.

Just then Ted Winchester slunk in. He was sporting a magnificent black eye.

“What happened to
you
?” Denton demanded.

Young Winchester mumbled something.

“He was in a fight over to Frawley's,” Amos Case said, pausing in the doorway, “that's what happened to him.”

“You? Fighting?” Denton eyed his employee. “What the devil were you doing in a barroom brawl, Ted?”

“Oh, it wasn't anything.”

“The hell it wasn't, way
I
heard it,” the printer said. “Sir Galahad in person. Defending the fair name of a lady.”

Young Winchester glared at the old man. “Why don't you shut up?”

“Think Jim ought to know how his demon reporter acts in public,” Amos said imperturbably. “Seems Red Almacher made a kind of dirty crack about you and Mrs. Guest, Jim. So Sir Galahad here socks Red on the jaw. You know Red—he'd rather fight than eat. It was quite a scrap, I understand. Sonny-boy “here wiped Frawley's floor up with the big galoot—knocked out two of his front teeth and pretty near broke his nose. Do we make a page one item out of it, Jim?”

“I wish you hadn't, Ted,” Denton said.

“I wish I hadn't, too,” Winchester said miserably. “I don't know what happened to me—”

“Might say you saw Red,” chuckled the old printer.

“Damn you, Amos! I mean, Mrs. Guest is such a darn nice gal, Jim. I just couldn't let her name be bandied about at a lousy bar by some filthy-minded town crocks. And to do it at a time like this, when her husband's hardly cold in his grave! But you're right, Jim, I probably only made matters worse. I'm sorry.”

“I'll tell you what I'm going to do, Ted,” Denton said gravely.

“Fire me? I've got it coming.”

“Give you a five-dollar raise. There's little enough decency left in this town.”

“Jim,” began young Winchester.

“Don't you want it?”

“Thanks, Jim.”

“I'll take it,” Amos Case said.

“You!” shouted Denton. “You've got the first dollar you ever scrounged. You're already making more out of this rag than I am. You go on the hell back to work.”

“Capitalist slave driver,” the old man said with a grin, and went about his business.

At 3:30, when Amos Case and Ted Winchester were gone for the day and he was alone in the office, Denton found himself dialing Corinne Guest's number.

20

Corinne's mother answered the phone. She greeted him so cordially that he knew she could not have heard the gossip linking him and Corinne in the murder of Angel and the death of George. It relieved him, for that meant Corinne had not heard it, either. The absolute certainty that it would reach her ears eventually he tried not to think about.

“How's Corinne holding up, Mrs. Chase?”

“Pretty well, Jim, considering. She's depressed, of course, but I think she's over the big shock. Would you like to talk to her?”

“Is she up to it?”

“Well, she gave me a list of the people she'd talk to if they called, and you head the list, Jim. Hold on a minute.”

When Corinne came to the phone, she said with an odd mixture of listlessness and warmth, “Hello, there.”

“You sure you're up to talking, Corinne?”

“I'm glad you called. I've had a lot of time to think today, Jim. I've been awfully selfish. I haven't asked you for days what progress the police are making. Do they have any idea yet who did it? I mean … about Angel?”

So she refused to think of George's death in the same terms, he thought. Poor Corinne.

“I still seem to be their star suspect,” he said lightly.

“Oh, no! I thought they'd dropped that foolishness when they released you after that first questioning. They can't really believe you did it.”

“Well, they're also investigating other angles. Maybe they'll turn up something. But I called to talk about you. How do you feel?”

“Sort of coming back to life, Jim. I'm just beginning to realize he's actually gone. But I'll be all right. Fred's had to go back to Houston, and my sister Kate has a job she can't afford to jeopardize, so she left this morning, too, but mother's staying for a while, and so are Dad and Mom Guest—at least till after the will is read and the legal matters are straightened out, I mean the store and things. I'm an absolute poopout where business is concerned—Dad Guest is going to help me.”

“How long is your mother staying?”

“Until Monday. I'm sure I'll be able to function by then. I'll have to. I can't go walking around like a zombie forever.”

“Of course you can't. Is there anything I can do, Corinne?”

“Not a thing, Jim. Maybe next week, when I won't have anyone to baby me.” She actually laughed.

“Atta girl. Well, I'll be talking to you, sweetie.”

“Yes. Do that. Please.”

He hung up.

And sat brooding.

The resilience of the human spirit was remarkable. Corinne had loved George Guest deeply; his death had been the worst shock of her life. Yet already—the day after burying him—she had begun the bounce back to reality.

Within a month the mourning bands would be gone from under her eyes. Within a year George would be an impossibly idealized memory which gave her only an occasional proud heartache. The most stubborn effect of his loss, her loneliness, might go on and on. But even the loneliness would fade in time. If someone else came along, it would die altogether. And so, at last, George Guest would be truly dead, a mysteriously remembered shadow of the past whose unimaginable bones lay somewhere beneath a name on a gravestone.

After all, Corinne was only thirty years old and—a memory of his own flickered briefly to life—a passionate and desirable woman.

She'll be all right, he thought.

And I?

But that was when Jim Denton jumped up from his desk, got hastily into his coat and locked up the
Clarion
office.

It had been press day, and on the sidewalk outside the street door Denton noticed that at least a dozen of the bundles of newspapers left there for the local news carriers had still not been picked up. He glanced at his watch. It was after four. High school let out at a quarter past three. The carriers should have completed their pickups over a half hour ago.

The hell with it, he thought. Let the papers rot.

It was the parents, of course. Couldn't have their innocent little sons working for an adulterous murderer.

He wondered cynically what the next development would be. Probably stones hurled through the
Clarion
window. Or dirty words painted all over the front of his house. Or both. And then—who knows?—a mob with a rope.

Denton shrugged and crossed the square to the court house. He found the district attorney and the police chief with their heads together in Spile's office.

The chief said hastily, “Hello, Jim.”

Crosby said nothing.

Denton said, “Hi, Augie,” and tossed the empty match folder he had found in Angel's candy box into Crosby's lap. Crosby picked it up and glanced at it. His face reddened.

“What's this supposed to be?”

“If you don't know, why are you blushing?”

The district attorney suddenly crushed the matchbook and flung it into August Spile's wastebasket.

“Exactly what I did with the note Angel left on her pillow,” Denton remarked. “So you see, Ralph? It's the human thing to do.”

Crosby compressed his lips. Denton laughed and turned to the other man. “Talk to Norm Wyatt and Gerald Trevor, Augie?”

The police chief nodded uneasily. “Up at the lodge.”

“Well?”

“Well,” the chief said, and stopped to clear his throat. “Course, Jim, I had to go slow. Couldn't come right out and start throwing accusations around. Made out like I was trying to trace George's movements last Friday night. Tried to pry out of 'em in every way I could think of if anything out of the way happened at the lodge that night. They just kept saying no. And I can't say I noticed any funny expression on Trevor's face.”

“So you didn't get anything at all, I take it?”

“Well, I spotted four shotguns in the gun rack. Two were twelve-gauge.”

Crosby growled, “It was a waste of time. Angel wasn't meeting any lover that night.”

Denton looked at him. “On what ground do you base that profound opinion, Mr. D.A.? That my late wife was above it?”

“I seem to have more respect for your late wife's memory, as you put it, than you do!”