“I can always use the change,” he said.
“How’s business?”
“It could be better. It could be worse. I can remember times when it has been worse.” He slammed the drawer of the cash register. “Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying business is good. I got the food plans and the supermarkets to contend with. People I carried on the books for years, they walk right by my store now that they got a little cash money in their pockets.” He looked at me with small hot brown eyes. “You on the road?”
“I’m not trying to sell you anything, Mr.–”
“Wolfe. Danny Wolfe.”
“My name is Howard Cross.”
“You live around here?”
“I’m from Pacific Point.”
“You don’t say. I got a married daughter lives in Pacific Point. You know her? Amy Miner? She married a fellow name of Miner.”
“I know her fairly well.”
“You don’t say. You should stick around. Amy’s on her way down here now. So you’re a friend of Amy’s.”
“I know her husband better.”
“Fred?” He leaned forward across the counter, resting his weight on his forearms. “Say, what happened to Fred? I always thought he was a good steady sort of fellow. When he came courting Amy in the first place, I was in favor of him long before she was. She had uppity ideas: an enlisted man in the Navy wasn’t good enough for her. Way back when she was a little girl, she had them big ideas of hers. I used to call her the Duchess.” He pulled his mind back to the present with an effort. “But it looks like I made a mistake about Fred, after all. He got himself into some pretty bad trouble, I heard. Hit-run driving, wasn’t it?”
“He killed a man.”
“So I heard. How did he happen to do that, anyway? When Amy came down to visit here this spring, she wouldn’t say a word about the accident. When I asked her about it, she flew right off the handle.” He scratched the day-old beard on the side of his chin. “I never could get Amy to tell me anything.”
“Fred was drunk when it happened.”
“You don’t say. I haven’t seen much of him these last years, but he never went in for drinking when I knew him. Maybe a couple of times he got himself plastered. Mostly it was the other way around. Amy used to gripe about how quiet he was. Course, it was pretty slow for her when he was all those months flat on his back in the hospital.”
He glanced up suddenly, his eyelids crinkled under the crushing eyebrows. He was aware of something unspoken between us:
“Say, has Fred had another accident?”
“He was killed yesterday.”
“I knew it!” he said in dry self-congratulation. “I knew there was something wrong when I was talking to Amy on the phone. I felt it in my bones. She didn’t tell me, but I knew it anyway.” Then he sensed his nakedness, and tried to cover it: “It’s a dirty shame, I say, a young man like him. Was he drunk again this time?”
“He was sober this time. When did Amy phone you?”
“A couple of hours ago. She said she was coming home. She didn’t tell me anything else. She’s a secretive girl. She always was a secretive girl. I call it false pride and vanity, if you want my opinion. Amy could never open out to anybody.”
“What about Kerry Snow?”
His eyes and mouth grew narrow. He peered anxiously around the store and out to the street. The street was still empty.
“You know Amy pretty well, eh?”
“Better than most people.”
“Is Kerry still in California? I haven’t seen him in years.”
“When did you see him?”
“Back in ’45, I guess it was. He used to visit Amy, I guess you know that. I wouldn’t want to spread it around unless you already knew it. Amy came home to keep house for me after her mother died and Fred was in the hospital with his back. You know how it is. I couldn’t hardly blame her for stepping out a little, and he was a nice-appearing young fellow. You know Kerry?”
“Slightly.”
“Then you know what I mean. He’s the sort that appeals to women, I never was myself. I told her she was making a fool of herself. He was younger than her, and she was a married woman. I always say a married woman should stick with her first choice. But she went crazy over him, she started blowing all her money on dresses and beauty parlors. Personally I never could see this hair-dyeing stuff. I told her if you’re gray, you’re gray. I was gray myself before I was twenty-five, and Amy took after me.” He patted the top of his head affectionately. “Is Kerry still around in these parts?”
“Permanently.”
“You don’t say.” Wolfe’s face struggled with a confusion of vague memories and vaguer hopes. “Maybe with Fred gone, her and Kerry will be getting together.”
“I doubt it.”
“You never can tell. She was all for ditching Fred and marrying Kerry back in ’45.” He nudged forward confidentially through the litter on the counter. “They were set to run off together when I put the kibosh on it.”
“You put the kibosh on it?”
“Yep.” His large hands came together like independent animals, and clasped. “I didn’t like the idea of any scandal, understand. Her mother and me had enough trouble with her when she was running around before she married Fred. So I did my duty as a father should. I was father and mother both to her by then.” He smiled for the first time, sentimentally. “I dropped a word to the wise, and Fred had it out with her. I guess he did, anyway. I didn’t see any more Kerry Snow around here.”
His smile expanded. Then he realized, too late again, that he had given himself away. His smile became a rictus, teeth clenched like an old dog’s on a last tearing corner of life.
“Maybe I oughtn’t to be talking. Amy goes her way and I go my way. You interested in Amy?”
“Very much.”
“Forget I said it, eh? Whatever you do, don’t tell Amy what I said. She can be a wildcat when she’s mad.”
“I know she can.”
“You’ve seen it happen, eh?”
I didn’t answer. I was watching the street for Helen. She was a long time coming. The afternoon seemed to be stretching out forever, while Wolfe and I traversed the windy barrens of his mind.
“She’ll be along soon,” he said. “Don’t worry. And you can set your mind at rest about Kerry Snow. There never was anything much between he and Amy. He drove down from L.A. a few times to see her and they went out dancing or to the movies, and that’s all there was to it. Ships that pass in the night.”
He was watching me closely now, estimating the extent of my gullibility and the degree of my interest in his daughter. The situation had grown unbearable. I terminated it:
“Mr. Wolfe, I’m sorry I have to tell you this. Amy is wanted for grand theft, and on suspicion of murder.”
“Suspicion of murder? You’re a policeman?”
“There’s a policeman outside. I was Fred’s probation officer.”
“So that’s what happened to Fred,” he said to himself. “She killed him, eh? Well, I can’t say I’m surprised.” His face was hard and shiny like polished white stone. “I always knew she’d come to no good end. She was defiant. More than once she threatened me with my life.”
He turned suddenly, and trotted jerkily to the meat-block behind the rear counter. A large knife flashed like a sword in his uplifted hand. “She threatened me with this here knife! Right here in the store! Her own father!”
He looked quite mad for a moment, a caricatured crusader leading an assault on the impregnable past.
“Put the knife down, Mr. Wolfe.” Shock had as many manifestations as there were kinds of people, and I didn’t want him to cut himself.
He dropped it and came trotting back on stiff knees, his eyes glowing like small brown electric bulbs in his perfectly white face:
“You said grand theft. Did she steal something? What did she steal?”