The name struck Quinn’s ears like a discord he’d been expecting to hear and was trying to avoid. “What about Mrs. O’Gorman?”
“Now I don’t claim the lady was lying. What I’ve seen of her, she seems a nice, quiet-spoken young woman, not like some of these overpainted floozies you meet on the street.”
“What did Martha O’Gorman say about the dent in the bumper?”
“Said she’d put it there herself a week beforehand. She claimed she backed into a lamppost while she was trying to park on the left side of a one-way street. What street and what lamppost she couldn’t remember, but everybody believed her.”
“Except you.”
“It seemed a peculiar thing to forget, to my mind.” Frisby glanced uneasily out of the window as if he half expected the sheriff to be lurking outside. “Let’s suppose for a minute that I was right in thinking O’Gorman was forced off the road by another car, only this car contained not a bunch of juveniles but somebody who had reason to hate O’Gorman and want him dead. In that case Mrs. O’Gorman’s story would make a pretty good cover-up, wouldn’t it?”
“For herself?”
“Or a—well, a friend, say.”
“You mean a boyfriend?”
“Well, it happens every day,” Frisby said defensively. “Heck, I don’t want to cast aspersions on an innocent woman, but what if she’s not innocent? Think about that dent, Mr. Quinn. Why didn’t she remember where she got it so her story could be checked?”
“There’s a point in her favor you seem to have overlooked. The lampposts in Chicote are all dark green.”
“So were about fifteen percent of the cars that year.”
“How do you know that?”
“I did my own checking,” Frisby said. “For a whole month I kept track of the cars that came here. Out of nearly five hundred, over seventy of them were dark green.”
“You went to a lot of trouble to try and prove Mrs. O’Gorman was lying.”
Frisby’s soft round face was swelling and getting pink again. “I wasn’t trying to prove she was lying. I wanted to find out the truth, that’s all. Why, I even went around examining lampposts on one-way streets to see if I could locate the one she hit, or said she hit.”
“Any luck?”
“They were all pretty beat-up, as a matter of fact. They were put in too close to the curbs. That was a long time ago, before somebody dreamed up those crazy tailfins.”
“So you proved nothing.”
“I proved,” Frisby said brusquely, “that fifteen percent of the cars on the road that year were dark green.”
From a drug store Quinn telephoned the hospital where Martha O’Gorman worked and was told that she had taken the day off because of illness. When he called her at home the O’Gorman boy said his mother was in bed with a migraine and couldn’t come to the phone.
“Give her a message, will you please?”
“Sure thing.”
“Tell her Joe Quinn is staying at Frisby’s Motel on Main Street. She can get in touch with me there if she wants to.”
She won’t want to, he thought, hanging up the phone. O’Gorman’s more real to her than I am. She’s still waiting for him to walk in the door—or is she?
Or is she? The little question with the big answer echoed and reechoed in his mind.
Martha O’Gorman called out from the bedroom, “Who was that on the phone, Richard? And don’t yell, the windows are open. Come right in here and tell me.”
Richard came in and stood at the foot of the bed. The shades were drawn and the room was so dark his mother was merely a white shapeless lump. “He said his name was Joe Quinn and I was to tell you he was staying at Frisby’s Motel on Main Street.”
“Are you—are you sure?”
“Yes.”
There was a long silence, and the lump on the bed remained motionless, but the boy could sense the tension in the air. “What’s the matter, Mom?”
“Nothing.”
“You’ve been acting kind of funny lately. Are you worrying about money again?”
“No, we’re doing fine.” Martha sat up suddenly and swung her legs over the side of the bed in an attempt at vivacity. The movement brought a spasm of pain to the entire left side of her head. Pressing her hand tight against her neck to lessen the pain, she said in a falsely cheerful voice, “As a matter of fact, my headache’s much better. Perhaps we should do something to celebrate.”
“That’d be great.”
“It’s too late for me to go to work now and tomorrow’s my day off and the next day’s Sunday. We’d have time to take a little camping trip. Would you and Sally like that?”
“Gosh, yes. It’d be super.”
“All right, you get the sleeping bags out of the storeroom and tell Sally to start fixing some sandwiches. I’ll pack the canned goods.”
The mere act of standing up was agonizing to her but she knew it had to be done. She had to get out of town. It was easier to face physical pain than it would be to face Quinn.
After lunch Quinn drove over to the office of the Haywood Realty Company. Earl Perkins, the young man he’d met before, was talking on the telephone at the rear of the room. His facial contortions indicated that either his stomach was bothering him again or he was having trouble with a client.
Willie King sat behind her desk, elegant and cool in a silk sundress the same green as her eyes. She didn’t seem overjoyed at Quinn’s return. “Well, what are you doing back here?”
“I’ve grown very fond of Chicote.”
“Baloney. Nobody’s fond of this place. We’re just stuck here.”
“What’s sticking you? George Haywood?”
She looked as if she wanted to get angry and couldn’t quite make it. “Don’t be silly. Haven’t you heard about me and Earl Perkins? I’m madly in love with him. We’re going to get married and live happily ever after, all three of us, Earl and I and his ulcer.”
“Sounds like a great future,” Quinn said. “For the ulcer.”
She flushed slightly and stared down at her hands. They were large and strong, and, except for the orange polish on the fingernails, they reminded Quinn of Sister Blessing’s. “Go away and leave me alone, will you please? I have a headache.”
“This seems to be headache day for the ladies of Chicote.”
“I mean it. Just go away. I can’t answer any of your questions. I don’t really know how I got into all this—this mess.”
“What mess, Willie?”
“Oh, everything.” She watched her hands wrestle each other as if they were separate entities over which she had no control. “Have you heard about Jenkinson’s law? It says, everybody’s crazy. Well, you can add Willie King’s law, everything’s a mess.”
“No exceptions?”
“I don’t see any from where I sit.”
“Change seats,” Quinn said.
“I can’t. It’s too late.”
“What brought on all the gloom, Willie?”
“I don’t know. The heat, maybe. Or the town.”
“It’s the same heat you’ve had all summer in the same town.”
“I need a vacation, I guess. I’d like to take a trip some place where it’s cold and foggy and rains every day. A couple of years ago I drove up to Seattle thinking that would be the right place. And you know what happened? When I got there Seattle was having the worst heat wave and the worst drought in its history.”
“Which goes to prove Willie King’s law all over again?”
She stirred restlessly in her chair as if she was having a delayed reaction to Quinn’s suggestion about changing seats. “You never give a straight or serious answer to anything, do you?”
“Not if I can help it. That’s Quinn’s law.”
“Break it for once and tell me why you’ve come back here?”