“Who is she? Where is she?”
“I think she’s here in town, or was as recently as last Friday night. She’s very likely been here for the last ten years. I’m surprised your husband never gave it away, even to someone as close as you.”
She was still standing over me, and I looked up into her face. Her eyes were heavy. She shook her head.
“Or maybe it isn’t so surprising. He’s very good at deceiving people, living on several levels, maybe deceiving himself to a certain extent. Mother’s boys get that way sometimes. They need their little escape hatches from the hothouse.”
Her bosom rose. “He isn’t a mother’s boy. He may have had a problem when he was younger, but now he’s a virile man, and I know he loves me. There must be a reason for all this.” She looked down at the cards and letters in her hand.
“I’m sure there is. I suspect the reason has to do with our two murders. Tish Macready is the leading suspect for both of them.”
“Two murders?”
“Actually there have been three, spaced over a period of twenty-two years: Helen Haggerty on Friday night, Constance McGee ten years ago, Luke Deloney in Illinois before the war.”
“Deloney?”
“Luke Deloney. You wouldn’t know about him, but I think Tish Macready does.”
“Is he connected with the Mrs. Deloney at the Surf House?”
“She’s his widow. You know her?”
“Not personally. But Roy was talking to her on the telephone shortly before he left here.”
“What did he say?”
“Simply that he was coming over to see her. I asked him who she was, but he was in too great a hurry to explain.”
I got up. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll see if I can catch him at the hotel. I’ve been trying to catch him all day.”
“He was here, with me.” She smiled slightly, involuntarily, but her eyes were confused. “Please don’t tell him I told you. Don’t tell him I told you anything.”
“I’ll try, but it may come out.”
I moved to the door and tried to open it. The chain delayed my exit.
“Wait,” she said behind me. “I’ve remembered something – something he wrote in a book of poems he lent me.”
“What did he write?”
“Her name.”
She started into the other room. Her hip bumped the doorframe, and Bradshaw’s cards and letters fell from her hands. She didn’t pause to pick them up.
She returned with an open book and thrust it at me a little blindly. It was a well-worn copy of Yeats’s Collected Poems, open to the poem “Among School Children.” The first four lines of the fourth stanza were underlined in pencil, and Bradshaw had written in the margin beside them the single word, “Tish.”
I read the four lines to myself:
I wasn’t certain what they meant, and said so.
Laura answered bitterly: “It means that Roy still loves her. Yeats was writing about Maud Gonne – the woman he loved all his life. Roy may even have lent me the Yeats to let me know about Tish. He’s very subtle.”
“He probably wrote her name there long ago, and forgot about it. If he still loved her, he wouldn’t have divorced her and married you. I have to warn you, though, that your marriage may not be legal.”
“Not legal?” She was a conventional woman, and the possibility jarred her. “But we were married in Reno by a judge.”
“His divorce from Tish,” I said, “is probably voidable. I gather she wasn’t properly informed of Bradshaw’s action. Which means that under California law he’s still married to her if she wants it that way.”
Shaking her head, she took the book of poems from my hands and tossed it with some violence into a chair. A piece of paper fluttered from between the leaves. I picked it up from the floor.
It was another poem, in Bradshaw’s handwriting:
At breakfast I had read the same poem aloud to Arnie and Phyllis. It had been printed twenty-odd years ago in the Bridgeton Blazer, over the initials G.R.B. I had a gestalt, and Bridgeton and Pacific Point came together in a roaring traffic of time. G.R.B. George Roy Bradshaw.
“When did he write this poem to you, Laura?”
“Last spring, when he lent me the Yeats.”
I left her reading it over to herself, trying to recapture the spring.
Chapter 30
Passing through the lobby of the Surf House, I noticed Helen’s mother sitting by herself in a far corner. She was deep in thought and she didn’t look up until I spoke:
“You’re sitting up late, Mrs. Hoffman.”
“I don’t have much choice,” she said resentfully. “I’m supposed to be sharing a cottage with Mrs. Deloney, and it was entirely her idea. But she put me out so she can entertain her friend in private.”
“You mean Roy Bradshaw?”
“That’s what he calls himself now. I knew George Bradshaw when he was glad to be given a good hot meal, and I served him more than one in my own kitchen.”
I pulled up a chair beside hers. “All this adds up to an interesting coincidence.”
“I think it does, too. But I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
“Who says so?”
“Mrs. Deloney.”
“Does she tell you what to do?”
“No, but it was nice of her to take me out of that crummy room in the Pacific Hotel and–” She paused, considering.
“And stash you in the lobby here?”
“It’s only temporary.”
“So is life. Are you and your husband going to take orders from people like the Deloneys until the day you die? You get nothing out of it, you know, except the privilege of being pushed around.”
“Nobody pushes Earl around,” she said defensively. “You leave Earl out of this.”
“Have you heard from him?”
“I haven’t, and I’m worried about Earl. I tried to phone home two nights in a row, and nobody answered. I’m afraid he’s drinking.”
“He’s in the hospital,” I said.
“Is he sick?”
“He made himself sick with too much whisky.”
“How do you know that?”
“I helped to get him to the hospital. I was in Bridgeton yesterday morning. Your husband talked to me, quite freely toward the end. He admitted Luke Deloney had been murdered but he had orders from the top to let it go as an accident.”
Her eyes darted around the lobby, shyly and shamefully. There was no one in sight but the night clerk and a couple who didn’t look married renting a room from him. But Mrs. Hoffman was as nervous as a cricket on a crowded floor.
“You might as well tell me what you know,” I said. “Let me buy you a cup of coffee.”
“I’d be up all night.”
“A cup of cocoa then.”
“Cocoa sounds good.”
We went into the coffee shop. Several orchestra members in mauve jackets were drinking coffee at the counter and complaining in the language of their tribe about the pay. I sat in a booth facing Mrs. Hoffman and the plate glass door, so that I could see Bradshaw if he came out through the lobby.
“How did you come to know Bradshaw, Mrs. Hoffman?”