“The hard way. The point is that I didn’t find out from you.”
“I only knew the last few weeks. I hated it. I’d have left him if I hadn’t been afraid to. Does that make me a criminal?”
“Afraid of what, Galley? Joe wouldn’t hurt a fly, the way you tell it.”
“He didn’t kill Keith,” she cried. “I’m certain he didn’t. He had no reason to.”
“Come off it, you know he had. You won’t admit it, because you’re afraid of getting involved yourself. As if you weren’t up to your neck already.”
“What reason did he have?”
“You gave me one reason this afternoon: Joe was blind mad, you said, because Dalling brought me to the hideout in Oasis. You’ve changed your story, now that the thing’s come real.”
“Keith wasn’t in his apartment. There was no shot. I would have heard the shot.”
“Nobody else heard it, either, but there was one. You want more motives? Joe must have known that you and Dalling were having an affair. Everybody else did.”
“You’re a liar!”
“About what, the fact, or the public knowledge of it?”
“It isn’t a fact. Keith was a friend, and that’s all. What do you think I am?”
“A woman who hated her husband. Call the thing platonic if you want to. Joe isn’t the kind to split hairs. You won’t deny that Dalling was crazy about you.”
“Certainly I deny it. I gave him no encouragement.”
“He didn’t need encouragement. He was a romantic kid. He would have died for you, and perhaps he did. He brought me into the case, you know.”
“I thought you said my mother–”
“Keith persuaded her. He paid a visit to her Sunday night and talked her into hiring me.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“She did. And it’s the truth.”
“She didn’t know Keith.”
“She met him Sunday.”
“How can you be sure?”
“The whole thing was a setup, when I met him in Palm Springs. He wanted me to find him there. Keith was afraid to come to me openly on his own, on account of Joe and Dowser. He felt caught in the middle between them. Still, he had guts enough to take me out there. It must have been hard to do, for a tender personality like Keith. And it really meant something.”
“Yes, it meant something.” I thought she added under her breath: “Poor fool.” She was quiet then.
We were on the open highway, headed north toward Long Beach. A strong wind was blowing across it, and I reduced my speed to keep the car from weaving. I caught occasional glimpses of the sea, white-capped and desolate under a driving sky. The unsteady wind whined in the corners of the cut-banks and fell off in unexpected silences. In one of the silences, under the drive of the motor, I heard Galley crying to herself. The lights of Long Beach angered the moving sky ahead of us. The wind rose and fell and rose, and the woman’s crying continued through strata of peace and violence. She moved against me gently and leaned her head on my shoulder. I drove left-handed so as not to disturb her.
“Did you love him, Galley?”
“I don’t know, he was sweet to me.” She sighed in the corners of her grief; her breath tickled my neck. “It was too late when I met him. I was married to Joe, and Keith was going to marry another woman. I took him away from her, but it couldn’t work out. He wasn’t quite a man, except when he was loaded. Then he was worse than a man.”
“He’s finished now.”
“Everything’s finished,” she said. “Everything’s on its last legs. I wish I had had a blowout when I was driving Joe in from Oasis. There wouldn’t be all these loose ends to gather up and live with, would there?”
“You didn’t strike me as the kind of a girl who wants an easy out.”
“There are no easy outs, I guess. I thought I was taking an easy out when I married Joe. I was sick of taking hospital orders, fighting off internes in the linen room, waiting for something good to happen to me. Joe looked like something good for a little while. He wasn’t.”
“How did you meet him?”
“I told you that, this afternoon. It seems like years ago, doesn’t it?”
“Tell me again.”
“There are things I’d rather talk about, but I will if you insist. I was on twenty-four hour duty with Mr. Speed for over two weeks. Joe came to see him nearly every day. He was running the Arena for him.”
“Who shot Speed?”
“One of Dowser’s men, Blaney I think. I didn’t dare speak out this afternoon. They might have been listening.”
“Did Speed tell you that?”
“No, he never admitted anything about the shooting. When the police questioned him in the hospital, he claimed he shot himself by accident. I suppose he was afraid they’d finish him off if he talked. It was Joe told me, after we were married. I promised him I’d never tell a soul, but I guess my promises to Joe are canceled now. He’s gone away without caring what happens to me.
“Gone where? Surely he gave you a hint.”
“I only know what I told you,” she said. “I believe he took Mario’s boat.”
“The Aztec Queen didn’t get very far.”
“Joe might have been covering his tracks. He could have had another boat waiting at sea for him.”
“His brother had the same idea.”
“Mario? Mario would know, better than I. Joe has friends in Ensenada–”
“I wonder. He may have business connections, but they really belong to Dowser. If Joe’s as sharp as he sounds, he’ll be running in the opposite direction – Did anybody meet him at the yacht basin?”
“I didn’t see anyone, no. I heard what you told Mr. Callahan about the man on the beach. It might have been Joe, mightn’t it, in spite of what the girl said?”
“It might. I think it was somebody else.”
“Who?”
“I haven’t any idea.”
“What do you think happened to Joe?”
“God knows. He may be in Los Angeles or San Francisco. He may have flown to Cleveland or New York. He may be at the bottom of the sea.”
“I almost hope he is.”
“What was he carrying, Galley?”
“He didn’t tell me, but I can guess that it was heroin. It’s what he deals in.”
“Does he take it himself?”
“Not Joe. I’ve seen some of his customers, and that’s when I started to hate him. I didn’t even like his money after that.”
“He ran out with Dowser’s shipment, is that it?”
“Evidently. I didn’t dare to ask him.”
“How much?”
“I couldn’t even guess.”
“Where did he keep it?”
“I don’t know that, either.” Her body turned inward to me, and she sighed. “Please stop talking like a policeman. I really can’t stand it any longer.”
The traffic was still fairly heavy in the Long Beach area, and I concentrated on my driving. On both sides of the road, the oilfield derricks marched like platoons of iron men across the suburban wilderness. I felt as if I were passing through dream country, trying to remember the dream that went along with the landscape and not being able to. Galley removed her hat and lay heavy and still against me until I stopped the car in front of her mother’s house.
“Wake up,” I said. “You’re home.”
Chapter 25
It was nearly two o’clock when I reached my section of the city. I lived in a five-room bungalow on a middle-class residential street between Hollywood and Los Angeles. The house and the mortgage on it were mementos of my one and only marriage. Since the divorce I never went home till sleep was overdue. It was overdue now. The last few miles down the night-humming boulevard I drove by muscle memory, half-asleep. My consciousness didn’t take over until I was in my driveway. I saw the garage door white in my headlights, a blank wall at the end of a journey from nowhere to nowhere.