“Thanks,” Tully said grimly.
He went out. There was a ferment of exultancy in him now. Maudie Blake had checked in four days ago. The same day as Cox! Surely...? He thought of the Witch in Macbeth. “By the pricking of my thumbs...” Was it likely that Julian Smith, with all his experience, hadn’t seen a possible connection between the Blake woman and the dead man?
The exultancy drained out of him.
Tully plodded over to his car, carefully not looking at the end room of the row. One look on his arrival had been plenty. It was too easy to imagine Ruth stealing up to it, glancing around, knocking surreptitiously...
He drove home in a torment of doubt.
How could a man live in love with a woman and not know her? Was Ruth capable of putting on an act that had fooled not only him, but his friends as well? Including a shrewd observer like Ollie Hurst?
It’s ridiculous and unreasonable, Tully kept telling himself. The actress didn’t live who could carry off such a role for so long.
Ruth had travelled widely. She had finished her education abroad and had a rather cosmopolitan outlook. So she was not particularly interested in the petty social cliques of a small town. She had been quite frank — with him — about her views on living there. But she hadn’t minded the smallness so long as she lived there with him, and nobody but him was aware of her attitude. She joined into the life of his set happily, if on her own terms. Practically everyone was crazy about her.
You couldn’t paint that sort of honesty into a picture of an adulterous killer.
Or could you?
His doubts were less insistent as he got out of the Imperial in his driveway. The house was still dark. He made a quick, futile search anyway. Then, because he could no longer resist, he began telephoning friends. He explained that he had returned from the capital sooner than he had expected. Was Ruth there?
He received invitations to golf, a dinner, a bridge session, but no clue to his wife’s whereabouts. If any of them had heard of the Crandall Cox murder, none had yet connected Ruth with it.
Between calls to others, he kept trying Mercedes Cabbott’s number. It continued busy. As he was about to try it for the fourth time, someone rang the doorbell.
Ruth?
But it was only Mercedes Cabbott’s son, Andrew Gordon.
Andy wore his usual sulky look. His breath was rich with liquor.
“I was just trying to get your mother, Andy—”
The son of Mercedes Cabbott’s second marriage brushed by Tully. He was a dark, lean, sullenly good-looking boy who might have been handsome if his features had had any strength. Tully suddenly realized that Andrew Gordon had a habit of pouting, uncomfortably like Sandra Jean Ainsworth. Too bad his character wasn’t as muscular as his body.
“Is Ruth at your place, by any chance?” There was no point in challenging Andy’s rudeness. He had been brought up in an atmosphere of special privilege.
“Nah,” Andy said. “Where’s Sandra Jean?”
“I don’t know.”
“She said she was stopping by here to kill a loose evening.”
“She did. Then she left to look for you.”
“Damn,” Andy said. “Well, it looks as if neither of us is having any luck with the Ainsworth sisters tonight. Got a drink handy?”
“You know where it is.”
But Tully noticed that Andy went heavy on the water and light on the Scotch. He always acted tighter than he was.
Andy clutched the drink and threw his leg over the arm of a chair.
“I had a real brawl with the old lady,” Andy said. “I was supposed to squire her around this evening, but then we got into it. It’s that damned George’s fault. Can’t Mercedes see he married her for the loot?”
Tully knew the petulant statement to be false. George Cabbott, Mercedes’s third husband, was a little younger than she, but he had plenty of money of his own. George was a husky, no-nonsense fellow who didn’t care a hoot what people thought of him. He wasn’t afraid of hard work, public opinion, or anything else. He and Mercedes were genuinely attached to each other, a fact nobody but Tully and a few other perceptive people believed.
“One of these days,” Andy promised, “I’m going to push George’s nose through the back of his neck.”
It might be a pretty good brawl at that, Tully thought. Physically Andrew was gristle, bone and cat-gut. George was a hundred and eighty pounds of rock-crusher.
“I could handle the old lady and marry Sandra Jean,” Andy continued to mutter, “if George would keep his nose to himself. He’s got my respected mother so worked up against Sandra Jean the old lady’ll use any excuse to break us up.”
Such as a sister hunted for murder? Tully wondered, and then winced at the absurdity of it.
Andy held his glass up to the light, squinting. To hide the misery? Tully felt sorry for him at that. The boy had had it pretty rough.
In her globe-trotting, gadabout career Mercedes had picked up a string of husbands. By two of these she had borne children. Her daughter Kathleen’s father had been a man named Lavery. Andrew was the offspring of Lavery’s successor, a mining tycoon named Gordon. Andy had been a small boy when his half-sister, already a young woman, died in a boating accident. This had been fifteen years ago.
In her daughter’s grave Mercedes had buried her maternal common sense. She had never worn an apron in her life, but the strings by which she tied her son to her had been no less hampering. She had protected Andy from everything, including his opportunity to become a man.
“Maybe Sandra Jean ran into Ruth,” Andy said. “They’ll probably come home together.”
“I don’t think so,” Tully said. “I don’t think there’s any point in waiting, Andy.”
Andy’s lip twitched. “Is that a gentle hint to leave?”
“No,” Tully said. “Though if you’re going to get argumentative, it might be a good idea.”
“Everybody, but everybody!” Andy exploded. He looked as if he wanted to throw the glass. “Like a stinking conspiracy. Send Andrew home so mama can tuck him into his itty-bitty bedikins! I’m getting so damned fed up—”
“Look, kid,” Tully said, “I’ve got too much on my own mind tonight to listen to your bellyaching.”
“You? What kind of trouble could the noble Dave Tully be in?”
“Skip it.”
“First you insult me, then you tell me to skip it! You trying to make me out a nothing?”
“You do a pretty good job of that yourself, Andy.”
“You’d better apologize for that,” the boy said excitedly. “I’m not going to stand for that—”
“All right, I apologize,” Tully said wearily. “Now will you start acting your age?”
“You stop talking to me as if I were still wearing diapers!”
“Well, aren’t you? Andy, I’ve asked you to lay off me tonight. Ruth is in the worst kind of trouble. Some man has been killed in the Hobby Motel and, unbelievable as it is, the police think she killed him. They’re looking for her now.”
Andrew Gordon’s skin underwent a remarkable series of color changes, from its normal sun-brown through a number of gradations of mud-tan to a final, dirty yellow. There it remained. The boy stared up at Tully as if he had received a fatal wound. Slowly he got to his feet.
“Ruth? Wanted for murder?”
“I told you it was unbelievable.”
Mercedes Cabbott’s son moistened his lips. “She wouldn’t do that to me and Sandra Jean — she couldn’t—”
“What?” Tully said, bewildered.
“I always thought that angel-puss of Ruth’s was too good to be true,” the boy mumbled. “I tagged her for a cheap lay long ago. But to kill the guy and drag Sandra Jean into the papers just when... Sure as hell, this is going to blow it with the old lady—”