The doctor followed Brake, emphasizing the realignment that was taking place. It had been two against him. Now it was two against me.
“I don’t really mind, lieutenant. I’d like to satisfy Mr. Archer completely and have it over with. If Mr. Archer can be satisfied.” Benning turned to face me in the waiting-room like an actor who has been groping for his part and finally begun to live it.
“There’s a conflict of testimony,” I said. “Florie Gutierrez says that your wife and Lucy Champion were friends. You claim they weren’t. Florie says your wife was out of the house when Lucy was killed yesterday afternoon. You claim she was here with you.”
“I can’t pretend to be objective in this matter, with my wife’s reputation at stake. I’ll tell you my own experience of Florida Gutierrez. She’s an unmitigated liar. And when my wife discharged her last night–”
“Why did your wife discharge her?”
“Incompetence. Dishonesty and incompetence. The Gutierrez woman threatened to get even, as she put it. I knew she’d go to almost any lengths to damage us. But the lengths she’s gone to have surprised even me. There seems to be no limit to human malice.”
“Was your wife in the house between five and six yesterday?”
“She was.”
“How do you know? You were taking a siesta.”
He was silent for nearly half a minute. Brake was watching from the doorway with the air of a disinterested spectator.
“I didn’t sleep,” Benning said. “I was conscious of her presence in the house.”
“But you couldn’t see her? It might have been Florie? You can’t swear it was your wife?”
Benning took off his hat and inspected its interior as if for a missing idea. He said slowly and painfully: “I don’t have to answer that question, or any other question. Even if I were in court – you can’t force a man to testify against his wife.”
“You volunteered an alibi for her. Incidentally, you haven’t proved she is your wife.”
“Nothing could be easier.” He strode into his consultation room and came back with a folded document that he handed to Brake.
Brake glanced at it, and passed it to me. It was a marriage certificate issued in the State of Indiana on May 14, 1943. It stated that Samuel Benning, aged 38, had been married on that date to Elizabeth Wionowski, aged 18.
Benning took it out of my hands. “And now, gentlemen, it’s about time I insisted that my private life, and my wife’s, is no affair of yours. Since she isn’t here to defend herself, I’ll remind you that there are libel laws, and false arrest is actionable in the courts.”
“You don’t have to remind me.” Brake stressed the personal pronoun. “There’s been no arrest, no accusation. Thank you for your co-operation, doctor.”
Brake slung a look from the door which tightened on me like a rope. We left Benning in the hallway, leaning like a flimsy buttress against the rotting wall. He was pressing the marriage certificate to his thin chest as if it was a love token or a poultice or a banknote, or a combination of all three.
The interior of my car was furnace-hot. Brake pulled off his coat and folded it on his knees. His shirt was blotched with sweat.
“You went too far, Archer.”
“I think I didn’t go far enough.”
“That’s because you don’t have my responsibility.”
I admitted that that was true.
“I can’t take chances,” he went on. “I can’t act without evidence. I got nothing to justify a warrant for Mrs. Benning.”
“You’ve got just as much on her as you have on Alex Norris. He’s still in jail.”
Brake answered doggedly: “He’s being held without charge for twenty-four hours. It’s legal. But you can’t do that with people like Mrs. Benning. She’s a doctor’s wife, remember. I stuck my neck out going to Benning at all. He’s lived all his life in this town. His father was the high-school principal for twenty years.” He added defensively: “Anyway, what have we got on her?”
“You noticed her maiden name in the marriage certificate? Elizabeth Wionowski. The same name as the one in the telegram. She was Durano’s woman.”
“That don’t prove anything about Singleton, even if it was evidence, which it isn’t. What I don’t see in your story is this idea of a woman changing partners back and forth like a bloody square dance. It don’t happen.”
“Depends on the woman. I’ve known women who kept six men on the string at the same time. Mrs. Benning has been alternating three. I have a witness who says she was Singleton’s mistress for seven years, off and on. She came back to Benning because she needed help–”
Brake brushed the words like mosquitoes away from his head. “Don’t tell me any more. I got to take this careful and slow or I’m up the crick without a paddle.”
“You or Norris.”
“And don’t needle me. I’m handling this case the way I have to. If you can bring in Mrs. Benning to make a statement, okay, I’ll listen. But I can’t go out and bring her in myself. I can’t do anything to the doctor just because his wife went on a trip. Nobody told her not to.”
The sweat was running down his slant low forehead, gathering in his eyebrows like dew in a thicket. His eyes were bleak.
“It’s your town, lieutenant.”
I dropped him at the rear of the City Hall. He didn’t ask me what I intended to do next.
Chapter 27
It was late afternoon when I drove through Arroyo Beach to the ocean boulevard. The palm-lined sand was strewn with bodies like a desert battlefield. At the horizon sea and sky merged in a blue haze from which the indigo hills of the channel islands rose. Beyond them the sun’s fire raged on the slopes of space.
I turned south into traffic moving bumper to bumper, fender to fender, like an army in retreat. The arthritic trees cast long baroque shadows down the cemetery hill. The shadow of Durano’s house reached halfway across its wilderness of lawn towards the iron fence. I pulled out of the traffic into the entrance to the drive.
The gate was still chained and padlocked. There was a button set in the gatepost under a small weathered sign: RING FOR GARDENER PLEASE. I rang three times, without audible effect, and went back to my car to wait. After a while a small figure came out of the house. It was Una. She moved impatiently down the drive, chunky and squat between the slender coconut palms.
Her gold lamé coat gleamed like mail through the bars of the gate. “What do you want, you?”
I got out of the car and approached her. She looked at me, and at the house, as if invisible wires were jerking at her alternately from each direction. Then she right-about-faced and started away.
“I want to talk about Leo,” I said above the traffic noises.
Her brother’s name pulled her back to the gate: “I don’t understand you.”
“Leo Durano is your brother?”
“What if he is? I thought I fired you yesterday. How many times do I have to fire you before you stay fired?”
“Was that the trouble with Max Heiss, that he wouldn’t stay fired?”
“What about Max Heiss?”
“He was killed this morning, murdered. Your labor turnover is rapid, and all of your ex-employees are ending the same way.”
Her expression didn’t change, but her diamonded right hand reached for one of the bars and gripped it. “Heiss had a lot of drunky ideas. If somebody cut him down, it’s no affair of mine. Or my brother’s.”
“It’s funny,” I said, “when I saw Heiss in the morgue I thought of you and Leo. Leo has quite a record in that line.”
Her hand left the bar and jumped like a brilliant crustacean to her throat. “You’ve seen Bess Wionowski.”
“We had a little chat.”