Somebody opened the door and the flower-smell wriggled in.
“What’s the matter?” Julian Smith asked him, eyes on Tully’s face.
“It’s those damn flowers,” he muttered. “Let’s get out of here before I throw up.”
When they were seated in the unmarked police car, Tully stuck his nose out the window and inhaled.
“Ruth ever mention a man of Cox’s description?” the detective asked, starting the car.
“I can answer that one positively absolutely,” Tully said without changing expression. “No. How about taking me home, Julian?”
But as they drove off through the gathering darkness, Tully found himself thinking that Ruth had never mentioned much of anything about herself and her life before they had met.
He sat back and shut his eyes. He suddenly felt sleepy.
“Here we are,” Smith’s voice said.
Tully opened his eyes with a start. They were pulled up behind his Imperial in the driveway of the split-level that had seemed so safe and desirable only an hour ago. The sun had gone down, but the house was dark.
Tully reached for the door-handle.
Smith said, “If you hear from her, Dave, contact me immediately.”
Tully looked at him blankly.
“Any other course would be stupid,” the Homicide man said. “You realize that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Tully said.
“I’ll keep Ruth out of the papers as long as possible,” the detective said.
“Sure, Julian. Thanks.” Tully got out of the car. He was vaguely aware of Smith’s hesitation. He shut the door and the detective drove away.
Tully stood still in the middle of the dark yard. He felt very queer — uniquely alone, in a timeless time and a space without margins. Had there ever been a woman named Ruth? Or even a hill, and a house?
Tully shivered and went inside...
He sat in the darkness of his living room going over what Julian Smith had told him on the way to the funeral parlor. The man Cox’s body had been found this morning by a Hobby Motel cleaning woman. One of the bathroom towels showed powder burns and multiple bullet holes. The revolver had been wrapped in several folds of the towel to cut down the noise of the shot. He had been shot the night before.
Ruth’s face above the towel... the tip of her exquisite little nose dead-white, the way it got when she was furious...
Tully clutched his temples, but he could not shut out the picture of that imagined motel room, or the voices from his ears.
“Cranny, I told you I never wanted to see you again.”
“You won’t use that thing, baby. Remember it’s li’l ol’ Cranny? How’s about a drink? Come on, lover, what do you say?”
“You promised me, Cranny. You promised.”
“So I promised. So what? Here, have a slug of this...”
“Stay back! I warned you, Cranny. You shouldn’t have followed me. You shouldn’t have called.”
“You came running, didn’t you? You don’t fool me, Ruth. You and me always had a thing going for us...”
“I came for only one reason — to make you get out of here and leave me and my husband alone!”
“When you’ve got it made with this sucker and I can cut myself in?”
“No! I won’t let you do it. Not to him, Cranny. I love him... Stay back, I tell you!”
“Give me that gun—”
It ended there. It always ended there.
Tully leaned back and sighed, feeling a little better.
Ruth indulging in a cheap motel affair for its own sake was simply unthinkable. Especially with a slug like Cox. Yes, even if she had known Cox from somewhere, in the past. Maybe at one time he had been quite different; time and a dissolute life often worked like mold in a damp cellar.
The imaginary dialogue his frantic mind had whipped up could not be too far from the actuality; Tully was sure of it. Cox had been in a position to rake up something about Ruth, something that gave him a hold on her, and she had responded to his motel summons to settle it.
The gun was the giveaway. Ruth would never have taken the gun with her if she had meant to acquiesce in his wishes — obscene, mercenary or otherwise. A woman who intends to climb into bed with an old flame doesn’t come to the rendezvous with her husband’s loaded revolver.
It was funny how a thing like that — a conclusion so clear — could make a man’s spirits perk, even if the corollary was that his wife had committed murder. First things first, Tully thought wryly.
That long-eared bitch of an eavesdropper in the next room hadn’t heard a bedroom party going on. She wouldn’t have been registered at the Hobby in the first place if she was a decent woman. To Hobby habitués any evidence of a couple alone in one of the rooms would mean only one thing.
And another thing. Why, if the woman’s ears were so sharp, hadn’t she heard the sound of the shot? The towel could hardly have made an effective silencer; there must have been some report. Yet she had not mentioned the shot to Julian. Or having seen Ruth enter — or, more important, leave — Cox’s room next door. There was something off-beat in the apparent fact that Julian’s witness, a lone woman of prurient curiosity, would overlook the chance to catch a glimpse of the female of the supposed hot-pillow party as she sneaked out of the next motel room. True, the eavesdropper could have had to leave on a date, although no such thing had been mentioned. Or she could have left her room prematurely to cross the motel courtyard to the tavern for a drink, or a pickup.
But, somehow, none of it added up.
Tully felt a small stir, a faint animal warning. That woman would bear investigation...
He got up and put on the lights and went to his den and put on the light there. Then he stood over the telephone table and rapidly dialed a number.
“Yes?” It was Norma Hurst’s old-woman voice. Norma was not an old woman; the querulous, almost anile, tone was a recent development.
“Norma? Dave Tully.”
“Oh,” she said. She sounded disappointed. “How was your trip, Dave?”
“All right. Is Ollie there?”
“He’s still at the office, and he knows we have a dinner date, too...” He heard Norma begin to cry.
Through his own preoccupation, Tully felt the old helpless pangs of sympathy. Norma Hurst had been acting oddly for almost a year. The Hursts had had one child, a darling little tow-headed girl with flashing eyes and twinkling legs who was never still. To provide an outlet for her daughter’s energies, Norma had bought her a trike. One day the little girl was pedaling wildly down the wrong side of the road when a town garbage truck came around one of Dave Tully’s curves and ran over her. The child was killed instantly and horribly. It had taken three men to remove the broken, bloody little body from Norma’s arms. Norma could have no other children. She had spent the next five months in a sanitarium.
Tully had never forgotten the day Oliver Hurst had to go to the sanitarium to take his wife home. “Please come with me, Dave,” Ollie had begged. “I’m scared to death.” “Scared of what, Ollie?” Tully had asked his friend. “They told you Norma’s all right now.” “The hell they say,” Ollie had said bitterly. “I know when Norma’s all right and when she isn’t. If you ask me, she’s never going to be all right — I mean the way she used to be. Dave, I can’t get through to her — I don’t even know how to talk to her any more. She’s always been fond of you. Help me get Norma home.” Of course, he had gone. It had been an eerie experience. There had been no outward sign that anything was wrong, but some important ingredient of the old Norma was missing — gone, perhaps forever. Poor Ollie had sat holding her limp hand and chattering away like mad on the trip home. Her only response had been an occasional vague smile.