“Was she here the night he disappeared?”
“I have no way of knowing. I did see a light in the cabin. Actually I haven’t seen her for weeks. I do have the impression that they came up here together quite often during the summer, practically every Saturday night.”
“And before that?”
He leaned against the sealed door and thought for a while, his thin brown arms folded on his chest. “Their visits haven’t been continuous, I know that. Bess first appeared in the summer of 1943, and that was when I met her. I wanted to paint her. Charles was excessively possessive, and he never again asked me back when she was here. After that summer, I didn’t set eyes on her again until 1945, when Charles left the Air Force. For the next two or three years I saw her at a distance quite often. Then Charles went back to Harvard in the fall of 1948 to study law, and I didn’t see them again until this spring. It’s possible that she followed him to Cambridge. I’ve never asked him about her.”
“Why?”
“He’s jealous, as I said, and secretive about his private affairs. It’s partly his mother’s doing. Mrs Singleton’s attitude towards the human libido is austere, to say the least.”
“So you don’t know where she came from, where she went, what she was doing in Arroyo Beach, who she was married to?”
“To all of those questions, I have to answer no.”
“You can describe her?”
“If I can find the words. She was a young Aphrodite, a Velasquez Venus with a Nordic head.”
“Try me again, Mr. Wilding, in simple language.”
“A Nordic Aphrodite rising from the Baltic.” He smiled reminiscently. “She was perfect until she opened her mouth. Then it was painfully clear that she had learned to speak English, if English is the word, in shall we say a rather barbarous milieu.”
“I take it she was a blue-eyed blonde, and no lady.”
“Baltic blue eyes,” he insisted. “Hair like pale young cornsilk. Almost too dramatic to paint seriously, though I dearly should have loved to do a nude.” His eyes were burning a figure into the air. “Charles wouldn’t hear of it.”
“Can you draw her from memory?” I said.
“I could if I wished.” He kicked at the dirt like a rebellious boy. “I haven’t really bothered with human material for years. My present concern is pure space, lit by the intelligible radiance of nature, if you follow me.”
“I don’t.”
“In any case, I never use my art, or allow it to be used.”
“Uh-huh. Very high-minded. You’ve divested yourself of time. It happens a friend of yours has done it the hard way, probably. Most people would climb down off their high horse and do what they can to help.”
He gave me a bitter, wrinkled look. I thought he was going to cry. Instead he let out another of his high inhuman laughs, which echoed like the cry of a lost gull down the canyon. “I do believe you’re right, Mr. Sagittarius. If you’ll take me home, I’ll see what I can do.”
He came out of his house a half hour later, waving a piece of drawing paper: “Here you are, as representational as I can make her. It’s pastel chalk sprayed with fixative, so don’t try to fold it.”
I took the drawing from his hand. It was a colored sketch of a young woman. Her pale blonde braids were coroneted on her head. Her eyes had the dull gleaming suavity of tile. Wilding had caught her beauty, but she was older in time than in the picture.
He seemed to sense what I was thinking: “I had to sketch her as I first saw her. That was my image of her. She’ll be seven or eight years older.”
“She’s changed the color of her hair, too.”
“You know her, then.”
“Not well. I’ll get to know her better.”
Chapter 17
I climbed the front steps of Dr. Benning’s house and rang the doorbell. The hole I had punched in the corner of the pane had been mended with cardboard and scotch tape. Dr. Benning came to the door in shirtsleeves, with suspenders dragging. His uncombed hair was a fringe of withering grass around the pink desert of his scalp. He had the air of a beaten old man, until he spoke. His voice was crisp and impatient: “What can I do for you? Weren’t you in my waiting-room yesterday afternoon?”
“This isn’t a professional call, doctor.”
“What kind of call is it? I’m just getting up.”
“Haven’t the police contacted you?”
“They have not. Are you a policeman?”
“A private detective, working with the police.” I showed him my photostat. “We’re investigating the murder of a colored girl named Lucy Champion. She visited your office yesterday afternoon.”
“You followed her here?”
“I did.”
“Do you care to tell me why?” In the harsh morning light his eyes were pale and strained.
“I was hired to.”
“And now she’s dead?”
“She got away from me. When I found her again, late yesterday afternoon, her throat had been cut.”
“It’s curious you didn’t get in touch with me before. Since she was my patient, and I was apparently one of the last persons to see her alive.”
“I tried to last night. Didn’t your wife tell you?”
“I haven’t had a chance to speak with her this morning. She isn’t well. Come in, though, won’t you? If you’ll just give me a chance to finish dressing, I’ll be glad to help you in any way I can.”
He ushered me into the waiting-room. I heard his slippered feet diminuendo up the stairs to the second floor. Ten minutes later he came down, dressed in a creased blue store suit, and freshly shaved. Leaning on the receptionist’s desk in the corner, he lit a cigarette and offered me the package.
“Not before breakfast, thanks.”
“I’m foolish to do it myself. I warn my patients about smoking on an empty stomach. But that’s the way of us doctors. Preventive medicine is our watchword nowadays, and half of us are still dying prematurely of overwork. Physician, heal thyself.” Benning had put on a professional manner along with his clothes.
“Speaking of premature death,” I said.
“I shouldn’t be chattering.” His quick smile held remnants of boyish charm. “It’s a bad habit I’ve fallen into, from trying to establish rapport with my patients. Now about this patient, Miss Champion. You say her throat was cut, Mr. – is it Archer?”
“Her throat was cut, and it’s Archer.”
“Exactly what sort of information do you want from me?”
“Your observations, personal and professional. Was yesterday the first time she came here to your office?”
“I believe it was the third time. I have to apologize for the condition of my records. I haven’t had trained help recently. And then so many of my patients are one-time cash patients. It’s in the nature of a general practice among, well, poor people. I don’t always keep full records, except in the cash-book. I do recall that she was in twice before: once in the middle of last week I think, and once the week before that.”
“Who referred her?”
“Her landlady, Mrs. Norris.”
“You know Mrs. Norris?”
“Certainly. She’s often done practical nursing for me. Anna Norris is the finest type of Negro woman, in my opinion. Or dark-complected woman, as she would say.”
“Her son is suspected of this murder.”
“Alex is?” He swung one nervous leg, and his heel rapped the side of the desk. “Why on earth should he be under suspicion?”
“He was on the scene. When they arrested him, he panicked and ran. If he hasn’t been caught, he’s probably still going.”
“Even so, isn’t Alex an unlikely suspect?”