“If he heard this, Hurst might feel it his professional duty to report it to the police.”
“That’s a damn nasty thing to say, Cabbott,” Ollie Hurst said. He was liver-lipped. “Dave just told you, I’m his attorney. Attorneys don’t run to the police to blab about their clients’ affairs.”
“No offense,” Cabbott said with a small smile. “I was given pretty definite instructions.”
“Instructions about what, for God’s sake?” David Tully cried. “By whom?”
“Ruth.”
His head kept swirling like the ice in George Cabbott’s glass. The groping thought reached him at last that at some point in recent time he had crossed without noticing it the line between hope and despair. Hope that he might hear from Ruth, that she was even alive...
“Alive,” he repeated aloud, turning it over on his tongue as if it were a new taste sensation. His voice rose in a joyous shout. “She’s alive!”
“Wait a minute, Dave,” Ollie Hurst was saying. He had his remarkable eyes fixed on Cabbott.
“Wait for what? George, where is she?” Tully sprang to his feet. “Come on, George, talk, will you?” He grabbed the big man’s shoulders and began to shake him.
Cabbott sat quietly, letting himself be shaken.
“David,” Mercedes Cabbott said. “David.”
“What!”
“You’d better sit down and listen. I have a feeling this isn’t good news.”
Tully sank back in his chair.
“It happened several hours ago, Dave,” George Cabbott said. “I began calling all over town for you, and when Mercedes came back home I got her to do some calling, too.”
“And wouldn’t say a word about why.” She leaned over and squeezed her husband’s hand.
“I was at Police Headquarters,” Tully said. He wet his lips. “George, for God’s sake.”
“She telephoned me,” Cabbott said. “She wouldn’t say from where—”
“Did you ask her?” Ollie Hurst asked curtly.
“Of course. She simply refused to say.”
“Are you sure it was Ruth?” the lawyer persisted.
“Her voice.” Cabbott shrugged. “Unmistakably.”
“Could it have been faked?”
“If it was, it was a perfect imitation.”
Tully said hoarsely, “Hold it, Ollie. George, if she wanted to get in touch with me, why didn’t she do it directly? Why through you?”
“I asked her the same thing, naturally. She said the police might have your line tapped. Also, she didn’t want to chance your talking her out of going away.”
“Going... away?”
“That’s what Ruth said.”
“The idiot, the little idiot,” Mercedes Cabbott said. “Acting noble at a time like this!”
“You mean,” David Tully said bleakly, “she’s leaving me?”
“I can only tell you what she said, Dave,” Cabbott replied in a patient voice. “She said she was sorry for keeping you in the dark so long about her dropping out of sight. She said she was all right physically. She said you wouldn’t be hearing from her again until she was safe, perhaps not even then. ‘Safe’ was her own word, Dave.”
“Safe,” Tully said. “And she didn’t tell you where she was planning to go?”
“No.” George Cabbott suddenly drained his glass. “I may as well give you the whole thing, Dave. She said for you to pick up the pieces of your life, and... well, she started to cry and said something like, ‘Tell Dave he’ll always be my sugar-pill,’ and then she hung up.”
“Her what?”
“Sugar-pill. I take it that’s one of her wife-words of endearment? When Mercedes is being especially nice she calls me her hay-bailer.”
Ollie Hurst asked, “Was that a special word between you and Ruth, Dave?”
“Yes.” There was the oddest look on Tully’s face. “No imitator would have known about it.”
“Then it was Ruth.” The lawyer abruptly got up. “I think, Cabbott, I’ll take one of your drinks after all.”
“Help yourself.”
“Will you have one, Dave?”
“No. Ollie...” Tully got to his feet, too. “I’d like to go now. Make it a quick one, eh?” He crossed the terrace to the doorway, hesitated, turned around. “George.”
“Yes, Dave.”
“Ruth said nothing at all about Cox? The motel? Anything like that?”
George Cabbott squinted at his empty glass as if it pained him. “That was the last thing I asked her — whether she had shot Cox. That’s when she hung up on me. Without answering.”
“Thanks, George.” Tully walked into the house.
“I’ll see you out, David.” Mercedes Cabbott rose and hurried after him. Oliver Hurst gulped his drink and followed. Cabbott remained alone on the terrace, staring into his empty glass.
Mercedes and Hurst caught up with Tully on the front steps.
“David, David, I’m sorry.”
“I know,” Tully said. Her hand in both of his was trembling and cold. He felt very little himself.
“Sorry for a lot of things,” Mercedes Cabbott said; and with some surprise Tully noticed that she was glancing Oliver Hurst’s way when she said it. But then she said in the old assured way, “I won’t keep you. God bless, David,” and she went back into her palace.
The two men walked slowly to Tully’s car and got in. “She was talking to you, too, Ollie.”
“You noticed that?” And the lawyer was silent. He did not speak again until Tully turned out of the estate into the public road. “I knew her daughter. Kathleen Lavery.”
“Oh?”
“Kathleen was a beauty. I was a college kid, and I went head over heels for her. She... reciprocated enough to scare Mercedes. I was a nothing, a nobody, without a dime. Mercedes took Kathleen abroad and she was drowned in a boating accident.”
“I’m sorry, Ollie.”
Hurst shrugged. “It was a long time ago.” But Tully noted the gray pallor that had settled over his friend’s face.
So now Ollie Hurst had his law practice and his Norma, and Mercedes Cabbott had her Colonial palace to rattle around in and her enigmatic George and her dead — and dying — motherhood.
And I? Tully thought. What do I have?
15
The moment Tully walked into the office Lieutenant Smith said, “There’s nothing new.” His desk was piled with papers which he rather stealthily covered with a phone book.
“This time you’re wrong, Julian.” Tully seated himself, uninvited, beside Smith’s desk. “You’d better give me a few uninterrupted minutes.”
The Homicide man studied him suspiciously. He wore a generally fretful and harassed look today. But then he became relaxed-alert all over; Tully saw it coming over him, like a change of clothing.
The detective picked up his phone and said, “No calls from anybody till I check back,” and he hung up and leaned forward on his forearms, clasping his hands. “You’ve got them, Dave.”
“I’ve heard from Ruth.”
Immediately Julian Smith’s hands unclasped. He reached for a pencil and pad. “You talked to her yourself?”
“No. It was a message, relayed to me.”
“By whom? When?”
“About three-quarters of an hour ago, by George Cabbott. Ollie Hurst was with me. I dropped Ollie off at his home and drove directly here.”
“When did Cabbott say he heard from her, and how?”
“Several hours ago. By phone.”
“Where was she calling from?”
“She wouldn’t say, according to Cabbott.”
“Why didn’t she get in touch with you in person?”