“She may have wanted to be punished. This will sound funny to you, I guess, but Alberta had a very strict, stern conscience. She was highly moral in everything she did. If she made a promise she kept it, no matter how long it took or what lengths she had to go to. I remember when we got into trouble as children Alberta was the first to admit guilt and accept punishment. She had a lot more courage than I. She still has.”
“Still has,” Quinn repeated. “Does that mean you visit her in prison?”
“Whenever I can, which isn’t often. Seven or eight rimes so far, I guess.”
“Do you write to her?”
“Once a month.”
“And she writes back?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have any of her letters, Mrs. Aguila?”
“No,” she said, flushing. “I don’t keep them. None of my children can read yet, but they have older friends, and then there are baby-sitters and Frank’s relatives. I’m not ashamed of Alberta but for the children’s sake and Frank’s I don’t advertise the fact that she’s my sister. It wouldn’t do her any good.”
“What kind of letters does she write?”
“Brief, pleasant, polite. Exactly the kind I’d expect from her. She doesn’t seem unhappy. Her only complaint isn’t about the prison at all, it’s about George.”
“Because she doesn’t hear from him?”
Ruth Aguila stared up at Quinn, her mouth open a little in surprise. “What on earth gave you that idea?”
“I understood that George, at the insistence of his mother, cut off all relations with Alberta.”
“Who told you?”
“John Ronda, the editor of the Chicote Beacon, and Mrs. King, who’s an associate of George’s.”
“Well, I don’t know them so I can’t call them liars. But I never heard such nonsense in my life. George is utterly incapable of turning his back on a member of his family. He’s absolutely devoted to Alberta. To him she’s not a woman nearly forty who’s been convicted of a major crime, she’s still the little sister he has to protect, see to it that she gets a square deal. I’m his little sister, too, but George knows I’m married and being looked after so I’m not really important to him anymore. It’s Alberta he adores and worries about and fusses over. Why should those two people have told you such a lie?”
“I’m pretty sure,” Quinn said, “that they both believed it themselves.”
“Why should they? Where would they get a story like that?”
“Obviously from George, since they’re friends of his, Mrs. King a particularly close one.”
Ruth Aguila’s protest was immediate and firm. “That’s really absurd. George wouldn’t deliberately make himself out to be a heel when the truth is he’s done everything possible for Alberta, more than she wants him to. That’s what she complains about in her letters. George’s visits every month distress her because he’s so emotional. He keeps trying to help her and she refuses. She says she’s old enough to carry her own burden and the sight of George’s suffering only aggravates hers. She’s told him she doesn’t want to see him, at least not so often, but he keeps right on going anyway.”
“People in prison are usually very eager, pathetically eager, to have visitors.”
“I repeat, Alberta is realistic. If seeing George’s suffering only aggravates her own, then it makes sense that she shouldn’t want him to visit her very often.”
“It may make sense, in a way,” Quinn said. “But to me it sounds like the kind of explanation she might use to cover up the real one.”
“And just what might the real one be?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps she’s afraid George might break down the defenses she’s constructed in order to adjust to and accept her present environment. You said she doesn’t seem unhappy. Is that what you want to believe, Mrs. Aguila, or the truth?”
“It happens to be both.”
“Yet she spoke of her suffering,” Quinn said. “Is there such a thing as happy suffering?”
“Yes. If you want punishment and are getting it. Or if you have something good to look forward to at the end of a bad time.”
“Say, for instance, a large sum of money?”
She looked down at the oil-stained water lapping at the Ruthie K’s gray hull. “The money’s all gone, Mr. Quinn. Some of it she gave away, most of it she gambled away. She told me in a letter that she used to spend weekends in Las Vegas when George and Mother thought she’d gone to Los Angeles or San Francisco to shop and see the shows. It’s funny, isn’t it?—Alberta is the last woman on earth I’d suspect of gambling.”
“Las Vegas is full of the last women on earth anyone would suspect of gambling.”
“It must be a very peculiar compulsion, especially when someone keeps losing week after week.”
“When you keep losing,” Quinn said, “is when you don’t think of stopping.”
Mrs. Aguila was shaking her head in sorrow. “To think of all the trouble she went to year after year to steal that money, and then all she did was throw it away—it doesn’t make sense to me, Mr. Quinn. Alberta never acted on impulse like that. She was a planner, a methodical, minute-by-minute planner. Everything she did was well thought out in advance, from her wardrobe budget to the route she drove to and from her office. Even a simple business like attending a movie, she conducted like a campaign. If the feature picture began at 7:30, dinner had to be served at exactly six, the dishes washed and put away by seven, and so on. It wasn’t much fun going any place with her because all the time she was doing one thing you could practically feel her planning the next move.”
Quinn thought, She’s doing one thing now, staying in jail, what next move has she planned? If Ronda is correct, she won’t even be free for years.
He said, “I understand that the mistake that tripped Alberta up at the bank was a very trivial one.”
“Yes.”
“I recall another trivial mistake that had consequences even more drastic than Alberta’s did.”
“What was it?”
“The night O’Gorman disappeared he was on his way back to his office to correct a mistake he’d made during the day. Two bookkeepers, two trivial errors, two disastrous fates within a month in one small city. Add these to the fact that O’Gorman worked for George Haywood at one time and that he probably knew Alberta, at least by sight. Add still another fact, that when I went to Chicote to ask questions about O’Gorman, George’s curiosity was aroused to the extent that he broke into my motel room and searched it.”
“You’d realize what a fantastic story that is if you knew George.”
“I’m trying to know George,” Quinn said. “So far I haven’t had much of a chance.”
“As for your other suspicions, and that’s all they are, you seem to forget that the authorities went into every possible angle when O’Gorman disappeared. There was hardly a person in Chicote who wasn’t questioned. George sent me every copy of the Beacon.”
“Why?”
“He thought I’d be interested since I came from Chicote and knew O’Gorman slightly.”
“How much is slightly?”
“I saw him in the office a couple of times. A good-looking man, though there was something effeminate about him that repelled me. Maybe that’s too strong a word but it’s how he affected me.”
“That type can be very appealing to certain women,” Quinn said. “You told me you haven’t met Martha O’Gorman.”