“According to Molly Fawn,” I said, “Snow spoke of a woman who had betrayed him to the police in 1946. Could you be that woman?”
“I don’t see how. How would he know of my part in it?”
“Miner might have told him, or Seifel.”
“Why should they?”
“I don’t know. I do know this: After Lemp was hired by your husband to … observe your movements–”
“To spy on me,” she emended.
“Lemp went back to Los Angeles and told Kerry Snow that he had located the woman.”
“The woman who had him arrested?”
“Yes. That seems to be what brought Snow here to Pacific Point: the hope of finding the woman and getting back at her in some way.”
“And you think I’m that woman?”
“I don’t think anything.”
“Then why have you been asking me these questions?”
“I was hoping to learn something useful.”
“About me?”
“About the case in general. After all, you are connected with it. You did have a hand in Kerry Snow’s arrest. Your chauffeur murdered Snow.”
“It’s murder now, is it?”
“Apparently. And your son was kidnapped by Snow’s crony.”
“Anything else?” she cried, a little wildly.
“Yes, there is one other thing. According to Molly Fawn, the woman Snow was looking for had red hair.”
She lay back in her chair like a fighter after a hard round, and spoke with her face averted:
“You disappoint me, Mr. Cross. I gave you credit for some intelligence. If you can’t see that I’m an innocent woman, you are a stupid man.”
“You’re not the red-headed woman in the case, then?”
“I have red hair, I can’t deny that. Everything else I deny.”
“All right.”
“It’s not all right. I’ve tried to be decent all my life. I think I deserve to be trusted. When I learned yesterday that Abel didn’t trust me, he lost his meaning for me. I no longer cared for him. I feel no sorrow for him.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I suppose I’m oversuspicious. It’s an occupational disease in law-enforcement work.”
“I’m sorry, too.” She would not look at me.
The boy called from the doorway: “Mummy! Is the argument over? I’m ready to come out now.”
“Come on then,” she said brightly. “Mr. Cross is just about to leave.”
chapter 25
I drove home to my walkup apartment. Emptying the pockets of my trousers, I found that I had kept the keys to the desert house and the keys to the Lincoln. Oddly enough, I liked the idea of having them. I went to bed.
When I woke up there was still light in the window, a sunset light burning like a grate fire behind the Venetian blind. I had been dreaming. I couldn’t remember the dream distinctly, but it had left a pattern in my consciousness. An insistent bell had been ringing at the end of a corridor. The corridor was both spatial and temporal. Along its echoing span, a man was running with a boy in his arms. I was the running man, and the boy in my arms was Jamie.
My thoughts were instantaneous, as immediate as sensations. The bell rang again. I reached for the telephone that had awakened me:
“This is Cross.”
“Forest. We’ve traced Arthur Lemp back from San Francisco. Miss Devon thought you’d be interested.”
“I’m interested.”
“You sound sleepy.”
“I just woke up. But I can listen.”
“The name he started out with was George Lempke. His father was a German immigrant, an ironworker in Pittsburgh. The son won a college scholarship and worked his way through law school. He was commissioned a second looie in the first war. After the war he practiced in Chicago, and did fairly well for a short while. Then he was caught suborning a witness to perjure himself in a murder trial. He served two years in Joliet, and of course the state association disbarred him. After that he was committed to a mental hospital–”
“A disbarred lawyer?” I said. “Committed to a mental hospital?”
“That’s what I said. He must have sprung himself out of it in pretty good time. He showed up in San Francisco in 1922, using the name of Arthur Lemp.”
I lost track of what Forest was saying. The dream came flooding back into my mind. The running man was Lemp as well as myself, and the boy in his arms with the man’s face was Seifel.
“Have you tracked down any of his relatives?”
“Not yet. His parents are dead. He had a wife at one time, but she didn’t stay with him long.”
“I see.”
“Did the D.A. get in touch with you, by the way?”
“What about?”
“He’s convening the Grand Jury tomorrow morning. I lit a small fire under him. You’re slated to be the first witness.”
“All right. Thanks. Good-bye.”
I showered and dressed. My hands were overeager. I never did get the collar of my shirt buttoned.
That, and the fact that I hadn’t shaved, were the first things Mrs. Seifel noticed. She came to the door of her suburban ranch-house, faultlessly groomed in a dark silk frock pinched very thin at the waist. Her black eyes examined me thoroughly, and showed no warmth:
“I know you, don’t I?”
“We met yesterday. I’m Howard Cross, County Probation Officer.”
“I am Florabelle Seifel. If you’re looking for Lawrence, he’s not here. I don’t know whether to expect him for dinner or not, thanks to you.”
“Thanks to me?”
“Thanks to your secretary, I should say. It’s very apropos that you should come here this evening. I’ve been wishing to speak to you. This nonsense between my son and your secretary has gone far enough.”
“Miss Devon is my assistant, and it’s not exactly nonsense. But that’s beside the point.”
“It’s very much to the point. You’re a public official, and you have some responsibility. It seems to me that your employees should be indoctrinated with some sense of class distinction. I’m not without power in this community, and when I see my son inveigled into a relationship with a social inferior–”
“I didn’t come to discuss that with you.”
“What then did you come to discuss with me?” She tilted her sleek black head and looked at me with hostility.
Her eyes were hard and black, impervious. It had probably been years since they had seen anything in the outside world that they hadn’t wished to see. Her self-assurance was almost paranoiac.
“Your husband, Mrs. Seifel. Mrs. Lempke.”
The change in her face was sudden and terrible. The mouth opened, ringed with white teeth, in a silent snarl of pain. The eyes narrowed to glimmering slits. The flesh crumpled. She said in an old hoarse voice:
“Go away. You’ve only come here to torment me.”
“Not at all. I want the truth. I’ll keep it to myself if I can.”
“I’ll kill myself. I can’t bear the shame.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t,” she said. “I’ve made a good life for Lawrence and myself. I refuse to see it end, and go on living.”
“It’s good for you, perhaps.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing.”
She was leaning in the opening, holding herself upright with one hand on the doorknob. The last of the sunset shone on her face like light from a distant fire.
“I suppose you intend to come in,” she said.
“It might be more comfortable for both of us.”
“Come in then.”
The house had an artificial beauty, like its owner. She led me into a glass-sided sitting-room that overlooked a flower garden, almost colorless in the dying light. The white carpet looked as if it had never been violated by a human foot. A Matisse odalisque reclined in an ivory frame above a white chaise longue. The pose that Mrs. Seifel assumed in the chaise was an imitation, conscious or unconscious, of the odalisque’s. It added a final touch of unreality.