“Where is she?” Una spoke as if her throat was hurting her.
“Blown again,” I said. “You might as well open the gate. We can’t talk here.”
“I might as well.”
She groped in the wide square pocket of her gold coat. I had my finger hooked in the trigger guard of my gun. All she brought out was a key, with which she opened the padlock. I unchained the gate and pushed it open.
Her hand closed on my arm: “What happened to Max Heiss? Did he get sliced, like Lucy?”
“He was put to the torch like Joan of Arc.”
“When?”
“Early this morning. We found him in the mountains, in a wrecked car. The car belonged to Charles Singleton, and Heiss was wearing Singleton’s clothes.”
“Whose clothes?”
Her fingers were biting into me. Contact with her was unpleasant and strange, like being grabbed by the branch of a small spiny tree. I shook her hand off.
“You know him, Una, the golden boy Bess was running with. Somebody blowtorched Heiss and dressed him in Singleton’s clothes to make it look as if Singleton died this morning. But we know better, don’t we?”
“If you think Leo did it, you’re crazy.”
“I’m surprised you still use that word in your family.”
Her gaze, which had been steady on my face, swerved away. She said with her head down: “Leo was home in bed this morning. I can prove it by his nurse. Leo is a very sick man.”
“Paranoia?” I said distinctly. “G.P.I.?”
Her rigid calm tore like a photograph. “Those lying sawbones at the clinic! They promised me they kept professional secrets. I’ll professional-secret them when they send me their next bill.”
“Don’t blame the clinic. I’ve seen enough commitment trials to recognize paranoid symptoms.”
“You’ve never seen my brother.”
I didn’t answer the unasked question.
“I’m going to see him now, with you.”
“I’ve taken good care of Leo,” she cried suddenly, “with trained nurses all the time, the best of care! The doctor comes every day to see him. I work and slave for that man, making him things he likes to eat, spumoni, minestrone. When I have to, I feed him with my own hands.” She choked back the running words and turned away from me, ashamed of the solicitous old woman jostling her other selves.
I put one hand on her stiff elbow and propelled her towards the house. Its red-tiled upper edge cut off the sun. I looked up at the barred window behind which Leo Durano had been receiving the best of care, and heard a silent word repeated like an echo from the wall many times.
Inside the front door, an iron stairway curved in a spiral to the second floor. Una climbed it and preceded me along a dust-littered hallway. Near its end, the large young man in the white smock sat in an armchair beside a closed door.
My presence startled him. “Doctor?” he said to Una.
“Just a visitor.”
He shook his cheeks at her. “I wouldn’t do it, Miss Durano. He’s been hard to handle this afternoon. I had to restrain him.”
“Open the door, Donald,” Una said.
He produced a key from his tentlike smock. The room contained a bare iron cot and a disemboweled platform-rocker bolted to the floor. A few shreds remained of the drapes that had hung at the barred window. Beside the window, the plaster wall showed handprints, and indentations that could have been made by fists. The inner side of the oak door had been splintered, and repaired with bare oak boards.
Durano was sitting on the floor against the wall in the far corner by the window. His arms, folded in his lap, were sheathed in a brown leather restrainer on which toothmarks were visible. He looked up at us through soiled black hair that straggled over his forehead. His bleeding mouth opened and closed, trying to trap a word.
The word sounded like: “Forgive.”
Una ran across the room to him and went down clumsily on her trousered knees. “We don’t treat you good, Leo. Forgive me.” She drew his head against her metal torso.
“Forgive,” he answered brokenly. “I forgive me. Released without charge. I told the ragpickers you can’t vag an honest man or the son of an honest man, told them I was doing my father’s business.”
Clasping the mumbling head in both arms, Una looked up at me scornfully. “This is the poor little fellow who committed a murder this morning, eh? Tell him, Donald, where was Leo this morning?”
Donald swallowed painfully. “Police?”
“Close enough,” I said.
“He was right in this room. All night and all morning. Every night and morning. Durano don’t get around much any more.”
“Shut up, you.” Una left her brother and advanced on Donald. “No smart cracks, fat boy. He’s a better man right now than you’ll ever be. You’d still be emptying bedpans for sixty a month if it wasn’t for Leo Durano. Mister to you.”
He backed away from her, flushed and cowering like a browbeaten German wife. “You ask me a question, Miss Durano.”
“Shut up.” She passed him like a small cold wind, and hustled off down the corridor.
I said: “Donald. What about Saturday night two weeks ago? Was Durano in his room?”
“I wasn’t here. We usually get Saturday nights off.”
“We?”
“Me and Lucy before she left. Miss Durano paid me extra to stay last night. He was bad last night.”
“You coming?” Una called from the head of the stairs.
She took me to the room with the picture window at the rear of the house. The sun’s fires had blazed out of control across the whole western sky and were eating at the sea’s edges. Along the shore where the beach curved, a few late swimmers were tossed like matchsticks in a bloody froth of surf. I sat down in a chair against the side wall where I could watch the whole room and its doors and windows.
Seen from inside by daylight, the room was spacious and handsome in an old-fashioned way. Kept up, it might have been beautiful. But the carpets and the surfaces of the furniture were gray with dust, strewn with the leavings of weeks: torn magazines and crumpled newspapers, cigarette butts, unwashed dishes. A bowl of rotting fruit was alive with insects. The wall plants had drooped and died. Cobwebs hung in shaggy strands from the ceiling. It was a Roman villa liberated by Vandals.
Una sat down at the card-table by the big window. The cards with which she and Donald had been playing the night before lay scattered across the table, mixed with a confetti of potato chips. A pair of clouded glasses sat on its edge. Una’s hand crept out onto the table and began to gather the cards.
“How long has Leo been insane?” I said.
“What does it matter? You know he didn’t kill Heiss.”
“Heiss isn’t the only one.”
“Lucy Champion, then. He wouldn’t hurt Lucy. They got along swell till she left. She was a damn good nurse, I’ll give her that.”
“That isn’t why you were so anxious to get her back.”
“Isn’t it?” She smiled a keen half-smile, as bitter as wormwood.
“How long has he been insane, Una?”
“Since the first of the year. He blew his top for keeps at a New Year’s party in the Dial, that’s a night-spot in Detroit. He was trying to make the orchestra play the same piece over and over, some piece from an opera. They played it three times and quit. Leo said they were insulting a great Italian composer. He was going to shoot the orchestra leader. I stopped him.
“It was New Year’s Eve and everybody thought he was loaded. I knew different. I’d been watching him since summer. He had bad headaches all last year, and along in the fall he was flying off the handle every day. It was Bess set him off, he never should have taken her back. They fought like wildcats all the time. Then he started to lose his memory. He got so he didn’t even know his collectors’ names.”