“No, but I know he wasn’t lying about that. I saw the wound.”
“Where was he wounded?”
“In Germany. He fought under General Patton.”
“Not geographically. Physiologically.”
“Oh.” She blushed. “He had a dreadful scar on his abdomen. It still wasn’t completely healed, after all these years.”
“Too bad.”
“That week in Santa Barbara he told me the whole story of his life. But even then I began to have my suspicions. There was this waiter at the Biltmore who knew him. The waiter called him by some other name: apparently he remembered Henry from when he worked at another hotel somewhere. Henry was quite put out. He explained to me that it was a nickname, but I knew waiters don’t address hotel guests by their nicknames, and I wondered about it afterwards.”
“What was the name?”
“It’s queer, I don’t remember. It’ll probably come back, though. Anyway, that was when I started to have my real suspicions of him. Then when we came out here he was always going away, on business he said, and he wouldn’t tell me where he went. On Sunday night we had a quarrel about it. He wanted to go out by himself and I wouldn’t give him the keys to the car, so he had to take a taxi. When the taxi-driver got back to his stand, I tipped him to tell me where he had taken Henry, and he said it was this Mr. Dalling’s house. I waited up for him, but he wouldn’t tell me what he was doing there. The same thing happened Monday night. He went out and I waited and waited, and finally I drove out to the house to look for him.”
“And found me instead.”
“And found you instead.” She smiled.
“But you didn’t tell any of this to Lieutenant Gary.”
“Not a smidgen. I couldn’t, with Henry right there.”
“Are you going to, when you give your evidence?”
“Do you think I should?”
“Definitely.”
“I don’t know.” She pushed her chair back from the table, marched up and down the length of the Indian-patterned rug, her plump hips teetering at the top of her long straight legs. “I don’t know whether I will or whether I won’t. He might have really gone on a business trip, and be coming back tomorrow like he said. Henry’s a strange silent sort of man.”
“He said that, did he, that he’s coming back tomorrow?”
“Something like that. Do you think I should believe him? It would be terrible if this was all a mistake, and I had called the police in, and he really did come back.” She stood facing the door, with a funny look of expectant remorse, as if Henry was there to upbraid her for having disloyal thoughts. “What shall I do, Mr. Archer? It’s taken me a long time to get around to it, but that’s really what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“What do you want to do, get Henry back?”
“No, I don’t think so, even if he would come. I don’t trust him any more, I’m afraid of him. It isn’t only his deception of me. I might be able to forgive that if he came back and proved that he loves me by turning over a new leaf. But I can’t help feeling that he’s mixed up in this terrible murder, that that’s why he rushed away so unexpectedly. You see, I don’t know who he is or what he is.” She sat down on the edge of the couch, suddenly and weakly, as if her legs had given way.
“I have a good idea who and what he is. Did the waiter in Santa Barbara call him Speed?”
Her head jerked up: “Speed! That was it. I knew it would come back to me. How did you guess? Do you know him?”
“By reputation,” I said. “His reputation is bad. He didn’t get his abdominal wound in the war. He got it in a gang fight last fall.”
“I knew it,” she cried, and shook her head from side to side so the bright dyed hair swung forward and brushed her cheeks. “I want to go back to Toledo, where people are nice. I always wanted to live in California but now that I’ve seen it, it’s a hellish place. I’ve fallen among thieves, that’s what I’ve done. Thieves and murderers and confidence men. I want to go back to George.”
“It sounds like a very good plan.”
“I can’t though, he’d never forgive me. I’d be a laughing-stock for the rest of my days. What could I tell him about the thirty thousand? It’s nearer forty when you count the car and all the money I’ve spent.” She kneaded her alligator bag with both clenched hands.
“There’s a possibility you can get it back. You have no notion where Henry went, I don’t suppose.”
“He didn’t tell me anything. He just went away. Now I know I’ll never see him again. But if I ever do, I’ll scratch his eyes out.” Her eyes glared from the ambush of her hair. I didn’t know whether to laugh at her or weep with her.
I looked out the window onto the lawn, where spray from a sprinkling system danced in the sun. “No letters? No telephone calls? No telegrams? No visitors?”
There was a long pause while I watched the dancing water.
“He had a person-to-person call from San Francisco yesterday. I answered the phone myself, then he made me go into the bedroom and close the door. Does that mean anything?”
“It may.” I stood up. “I’ll try it anyway. You got no hint of who was calling, no names given?”
“No.”
“But you’re positive it was a San Francisco call.”
“Oh, yes. The operator said so.” She had pushed back her hair from her face and was looking less upset. There was an ice-chip hardness in her eyes I hadn’t noticed before.
“I ought to tell you, Mrs. Fellows–”
“Mrs. Barron,” she said stubbornly. “I was never really married to him.”
“Mrs. Barron, then. You might get better results if you took your story to the police.”
“I can’t. It would be in all the papers. I could never go home at all then. Don’t you see?”
“If I recover your money, or any part of it, I’ll take a percentage, fifteen percent. That would be forty-five hundred out of thirty thousand.”
“All right.”
“Otherwise I’ll charge you for my expenses and nothing else. I usually work for a daily fee, but this case is different.”
“Why is it so different?”
“I have my own reasons for wanting to talk to Henry. And if I find him, I’ll do what I think best. I’m making you no promises.”
Chapter 27
It was midnight when I parked my car under Union Square. A wet wind blew across the almost deserted square, blowing fogged breath from the sea on the dark pavements. Flashing neons on all four sides repudiated the night. I turned down a slanting street past a few late couples strolling and lingering on the sidewalk.
The Den’s orange sign was one of a dozen bar signs on its block. I went down a dirty flight of stairs and looked into the place through a swinging glass door at the bottom. It was a large square room with rounded corners and a ceiling so low you could feel the weight of the city over it. A curved bar arched out from the left-hand wall, making space for a bartender and his array of bottles. The other walls were lined with booths and tables.
In the cleared space in the middle of the room, a tired-looking man in a worn tuxedo was beating the life out of an exhausted grand piano. All the furniture, including the piano, was enameled a garish orange. A sequence of orange-haired nudes romped and languished along the walls under a glaze of grime. I went in.
There were several customers at the bar: a couple well-dressed and young and looking out of place, and a pair of lone-wolfing sailors. A few others, all of them men, were propped like dummies at the tables, waiting for something wonderful to happen, a new life to begin, in more delightful places, under different names. Five or six revelers, all of them women, and hard cases by their looks, were standing around the piano in a chorybantic circle, moving various members in approximate time to the music. One of them, a streaked blonde in a green dress with a drooping hemline, raised what passed for her voice in a banshee sort of singing. The whole thing had the general effect of a wake.