“She was pointed out to me on the street once.”
“By whom?”
She hesitated for a moment. “George. He thought she was a very attractive woman and he wondered why she’d thrown herself away on a man like O’Gorman.”
Quinn wondered, too, in spite of all the good things Martha O’Gorman had said about her marriage. “Was George interested in her?”
“I think he could have been if she hadn’t already been married. It’s a shame she was. George needed, and still needs, a wife. His own died when he was barely thirty. The longer he waits, the more he lives at home alone with Mother, the harder it will be for him to break away. I know how hard it is, I had to do it, break away or be broken.”
It seemed to Quinn that whenever he turned another corner, he met up with George Haywood, and that the connection between the two cases, which he’d suspected from the beginning, was not Alberta Haywood as he’d once thought, but George. George and Martha O’Gorman, the respectable businessman and the grieving widow. And maybe the reason Martha hadn’t remarried had nothing to do with her devotion to O’Gorman’s memory; she was waiting for George to break away from his mother. That would make two of them, he thought. Martha O’Gorman and Willie King, and I wouldn’t bet a nickel on Willie’s chances.
He said, “You’ve spoken of George’s loyalty to and fondness for his sister. Did it work both ways?”
“Yes. Too much so.”
“Too much?”
Twin spots of color appeared on her cheeks and her hands gripped the railing tightly as if she were afraid of falling overboard. “I shouldn’t have said that, I guess. I mean, I’m no psychologist, I have no right to go around analyzing people. Only—well, I can’t help thinking George made a mistake going back home after his wife died. George used to be a warm, affectionate man who could give love and accept it—I mean real love, not the neurotic kind like my mother’s and Alberta’s. Perhaps it’s uncharitable of me to talk this way about them, and I probably wouldn’t do it if they’d acted decent about my marriage to Frank. That’s a long answer to a short question, isn’t it?
“More briefly, yes, Alberta was very fond of George. Without him around, her whole life might have been different, more satisfactory to her, so that she wouldn’t have had to steal and gamble, she’d have gotten married like any ordinary woman, I think George understands this, in a way, and is ridden by guilt because of it. And so he goes to visit her, and they watch each other suffer, and—oh, it’s such a rotten mess it makes me sick. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I hate them. I hate all three of them. I don’t want Frank or my children to be forced to have anything to do with any of them.”
Quinn was surprised by the violence of her feelings, and he guessed that she was, too. She looked anxiously around at the boats moored nearby as if to make sure nobody had overheard her outburst. Then she turned back to Quinn with a sheepish little smile. “Frank says this always happens when I talk about my family. I start out by being very unemotional and detached, and end up in hysterics.”
“I wish all the hysterics I had to deal with were as quiet.”
“The fact is, the only thing I want from my family is to be let alone. When I watched you climbing up that ladder, knowing you were going to talk about Alberta, I felt like pushing you overboard.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” Quinn said. “This is my only suit.”
When he returned to the Briny Belle it was five o’clock. The Admiral was pacing up and down the bull run, wearing a new white outfit and the same old dirty expression. “Where the hell you been, you lazy bum? You’re supposed to stay on board twenty-four hours a day.”
“I saw this fancy blonde on the breakwater. She looked like Elsie, so I thought I’d better check. It was Elsie all right--”
“Weeping Jesus! Let’s get out of here. Call the Captain. Tell him we’re leaving immediately.”
“—Elsie Doolittle from Spokane. Nice girl.”
“Why, you lousy bum,” Connelly said. “You can’t help making funnies, eh? At my expense, eh? I ought to kick your teeth in.”
“You might mess up your sailor suit.”
“By God, if I were twenty years younger—”
“If you were twenty years younger you’d be the same as you are now, a knuckle-headed lush who couldn’t beat a cocker spaniel at gin rummy without cheating.”
“I didn’t cheat!” Connelly shouted. “I never cheated in my life. Apologize this instant or I’ll sue you for libel.”
Quinn looked amused. “I caught on to you halfway through the first game. Either stop cheating or take lessons.”
“You won. How could I have been cheating if you won?”
“I took lessons.”
Connelly’s mouth hung open like a hooked halibut’s. “Why, you double-crossed me. You’re nothing but a thief.”
He began screaming for Captain McBride, the crew, the police, the harbor patrol. About a dozen people had gathered around by this time. Quinn went quietly down the gangplank, without waiting for his salary. In his pocket he had about three hundred dollars of Connelly’s money, the equivalent of four days’ pay at seventy-five a day. He felt better about it than if he’d accepted it from Connelly’s hand.
Take a long walk on a short deck, Admiral.
Eleven
The Tecolote Prison for Women was a collection of concrete buildings built on a two-hundred-acre plateau above Deer Valley. Quinn guessed that the site had been chosen to discourage escapees, since there was no place to escape to. The countryside was more bleak than that which surrounded the Tower. There were no towns within fifty miles, and the stony soil and sparse rainfall had discouraged farmers and ranchers. The paved road that led to Tecolote stopped at the prison gates as if the engineers who built it had quit and gone home in despair.
At the administration building Quinn told the woman in charge that he wanted to see Alberta Haywood, and presented the private detective’s license issued to him by the State of Nevada. After half an hour’s questioning he was taken across a paved courtyard and left in one of the ground-floor rooms of a three-storied concrete building. The room looked as though someone had once started to decorate it. Half the windows were curtained and several oil paintings hung on the walls. There were two or three upholstered chairs, but most of the seating space was provided by wooden benches similar to the benches in the community dining hall at the Tower.
Other people were waiting: an elderly couple who stood close together beside the doorway exchanging anxious whispers; a young woman whose identity was hidden, or lost, under layers of make-up; a man Quinn’s age, with dull eyes and sharp clothes; three blue-uniformed women with the artificial poise and nervous group-gaiety of volunteer social workers; a man and his teen-aged son who looked as though they’d had an argument about coming, not their first, not their last; a gray-haired woman carrying a paper bag with a split in it. Through the split Quinn could see the red sheen of an apple.
Names were called by a guard and people were led away until only Quinn and the father with the teen-aged boy were left in the room.
The man began to talk in a low intense voice. “You’re to be more polite to your mother this time, you hear me? None of this sullen stuff. She’s your own mother.”
“Don’t I know it? I get it rubbed in my face every day at school.”
“None of that now. Put yourself in her shoes. She’s lonely, she looks forward to seeing you. The least you can do is smile, be pleasant, tell her she’s looking good and we miss her.”