Quinn returned the pictures to the envelope, his movements slowed by a sudden feeling of depression. Until he studied the portrait, O’Gorman had seemed unreal to him. Now O’Gorman had become a human being, a man who loved his wife and children and house and dog, who worked hard at his job, a man too soft-hearted to leave a hitchhiker standing on the road on a stormy night yet brave enough to resist a robber.
He had two bucks in his pocket, Quinn thought as he took off his clothes and got into bed. Why did he put up a fight for a lousy two bucks? It doesn’t make sense. There must have been something else, something no one has mentioned…. I must talk to Martha O’Gorman again tomorrow. Maybe Ronda can arrange it for me.
He didn’t remember, until just before he fell asleep, that he had planned on driving back to the Tower in the morning, and from there to Reno. Both places were beginning to seem remote to him, dream stuff compared to the blunt and solid reality of Chicote. He couldn’t even conjure up a clear picture of Doris, and Sister Blessing was no more than a bulky gray robe with a faceless head sticking out of one end and two large bare feet out of the other.
Five
Early the next morning Quinn returned to the motel office. A middle-aged man, with a bald, sunburned pate, was untying a bundle of Los Angeles papers.
“What can I do for you, Mr. — ah — Quinn, isn’t it? Seventeen?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Paul Frisby, owner and manager, with the aid of my family. Is anything the matter?”
“Someone got into my room last night when I went across the road to have dinner.”
“I did,” Frisby said coldly.
“Any particular reason why?”
“Two of them. It’s our policy that when a guest checks in without any luggage, we give his room the once-over when he goes out to eat. In your case there was an additional reason: the name on your car registration isn’t Quinn.”
“The car was lent to me by a friend.”
“Oh, I believe you. But in this business it pays to be careful.”
“Granted,” Quinn said. “Only why the cloak-and-dagger routine?”
“Pardon?”
“The business of disguising yourself with a hat and topcoat and getting the key from the old man.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Frisby said, narrowing his eyes. “I have my own set of keys. Now what’s this about grandpa?”
Quinn explained briefly.
“Grandpa has trouble with his eyes,” Frisby said. “Glaucoma. You mustn’t blame—”
“I’m not blaming anybody. I’d just like to know how someone else could walk in here, ask for my key and get it.”
“We try to prevent things like that happening. But in the motel business they happen occasionally, especially if the impostor knows the name and car license number of the guest. Was anything taken?”
“I’m not sure. There were two boxes on the desk containing documents lent to me to examine. You must have seen the boxes when you were in the room, Frisby.”
“Well. Well, as a matter of fact, yes.”
“Did you open either of them?”
Frisby’s face turned as red as the sunburn on his pate. “No. No, I didn’t have to. I saw the label, O’Gorman. Everybody in Chicote knows all about that case. Oh certainly, I was curious about why a stranger should suddenly appear in town with a lot of stuff about O’Gorman.”
There was a long uneasy silence.
“Just how curious were you?” Quinn said finally. “Did you tell your wife, for instance?”
“Well, I sort of mentioned it to her, yes.”
“Anyone else?”
“Mister. Put yourself in my place for a minute—”
“Who else?”
After another silence Frisby said nervously, “I phoned the sheriff, I thought there might be some hanky-panky going on that he ought to know about, maybe something real serious. I can see now I was wrong.”
“Can you?”
“I’m a pretty good judge of character and you don’t act like a man who’s got anything much to hide. But yesterday it was different. You check in with no luggage, driving a car with someone else’s name and address on it and you’re toting around a lot of stuff about O’Gorman. You can’t blame me for being suspicious.”
“So you called the sheriff.”
“I just talked to him. He promised he’d keep his eye out for you.”
“Would keeping his eye out extend to tricking an old man into giving him the key to number seventeen?”
“Great Scott, no,” Frisby said vigorously. “Besides, Grandpa’s known the sheriff since he was a little boy.”
“Everybody in Chicote seems to know everybody else.”
“It’s a fact. There’s no metropolis anywhere near, we’re not on a main highway and it’s rugged country. Here we all are, dependent on each other for survival, so naturally we get to know each other.”
“And naturally you’re suspicious of strangers.”
“It’s a close community, Mr, Quinn. When something like the O’Gorman affair happens, it affects every one of us. Most of us knew him, went to school with him or worked with him or met him at church and civic gatherings and the P.T.A. Not that O’Gorman was much for getting involved with community business, but Mrs. O’Gorman was, and he tagged along.” A small grim smile moved across Frisby’s face. “You might say that’s a fitting epitaph for O’Gorman: ‘He tagged along.’ What’s your interest in the case, Mr. Quinn? You going to write it up, maybe, for one of those true-crime magazines?”
“Maybe.”
“Be sure to let me know when it’s published.”
“I’ll do that,” Quinn said.
He ate breakfast in a coffee shop, sitting at a front table so he could watch his car parked across the road with the O’Gorman file locked in the trunk. Although Frisby had given him no lead about the intruder of the previous night, he’d given him something else for which Quinn was gratefuclass="underline" an excuse to go around asking questions. He was, hereafter, an amateur writer looking for a new angle on the disappearance of O’Gorman.
He bought a pocket-sized notebook and a couple of ball point pens at a drug store before he drove to the Beacon office on Eighth Avenue. As soon as he opened the door he could hear John Ronda’s voice distinctly above the clatter of typewriters and the ringing of a telephone. The red-haired Miss de Vries would have had no trouble at all eavesdropping even if she’d worn earmuffs.
Ronda said, “Good morning, Quinn. I see you’ve brought my file back safely.”
“I’m not sure how safely.” Quinn told him about the man with the topcoat and fedora.
Ronda listened, frowning and drumming his fingers on the desk. “Maybe he was just a petty thief after something else in the room.”
“There wasn’t anything else. I left my stuff in Reno, I intended to be back there by now.”
“Why aren’t you?”
“I got interested in O’Gorman,” Quinn said easily. “I thought it might make an interesting article for one of the true-crime magazines.”
“It already has, about a dozen times in the past five and a half years.”
“Maybe I’ll find a new angle. I started off on the wrong foot with Mrs. O’Gorman yesterday but I thought you might be able to fix that for me.”
“How?”
“Call her, give me a little build-up.”
Ronda looked pensively up at the ceiling. “I guess I could try it, but I’m not sure I want to. I know nothing about you.”
“Ask questions, we’ll get acquainted.”
“All right. First, I’d better warn you, however, that I talked to Martha O’Gorman last night and she told me about your phone call and subsequent visit to her house. What interested me is that when you telephoned Martha at noon you apparently weren’t aware that O’Gorman was dead.”