Royal shook his head curtly. A tall man came in past the guard. He had greying blond crewcut hair and a long face. His mouth was pinched as though he’d been sucking a lemon. He took the woman by the arm and tried to drag her away from the bed.
She resisted his efforts without looking at him. She was staring hungrily at her brother’s face.
“Don’t you want me to help you?”
“You were among the missing when I needed it. You know what you can do with it now. Get lost.”
“You heard him, Evelyn,” the tall man said. He had a faint Scandinavian accent, more a lack of timbre than an accent. “He wants no part of us. We want no part of him.”
“But he’s my brother.”
“I know that, Evelyn. Do you want everyone in the Bay area to know it? Do you want young Thor to lose his fraternity connection? Do you want people pointing me out on Montgomery Street?”
“You hear your husband,” Campion said. “Why don’t you amscray, sister? Fold your tents like the Arabs and silently steal away.”
The resident doctor appeared with a nurse in tow. He cast a withering glance around the room.
“May I remind you this is a hospital, Captain. This man is your prisoner but also my patient. I gave you permission to question him on the understanding that it would be quiet and brief.”
Royal started to say: “I’m not responsible–”
“I am. I want this room cleared immediately. That includes you, Captain.”
“I’m not finished with my interrogation.”
“It can wait till morning.”
Royal dropped the issue. He had the trial to think of, and the use that Campion’s defense could make of the doctor’s testimony. He walked out. The rest of us went along.
Not entirely by accident, I met the Jurgensen couple in the parking lot. They pretended not to see me, but I planted myself between them and their Mercedes sedan and made a fast pitch to her.
“I’m a private detective working on this case and it’s come to my attention that there are some holes in the case against your brother. I’d like very much to talk to you about it.”
“Don’t say a word, Evelyn,” her husband said.
“If we could sit down and have an exchange of views, Mrs. Jurgensen–”
“Pay no attention, Evelyn. He’s simply trying to pump you.”
“Why don’t you stay out of this?” I said. “He isn’t your brother.”
She turned to him. “I’m worried about him, Thor, and I’m ashamed. All these months we’ve pretended he didn’t exist, that we had no connection–”
“We have no connection. We decided that between us and that’s the way it’s going to be.”
“Why don’t you let the lady do her own talking?” I said.
“There isn’t going to be any talking. You get out of the way.”
He took me by the shoulder and pushed me to one side. There was no point in hitting him. The Mercedes whisked them away to their half-acre earthly paradise.
I checked in at a Camino Real motel and went to sleep trying to think of some one thing I could do that would be absolutely right and final. I dreamed that Campion was innocent and I had to prove it by re-enacting the crimes with paper dolls that stuck to my fingers. Then I found Harriet’s body in the lake. She had talon marks on her head.
I awoke in a cold sweat. The late night traffic whirred with a sound like wings along the highway.
20
I GOT UP into the sharp-edged uncertainties of morning and drove across the county to Luna Bay. Patrick Mungan, the deputy in charge there, was a man I knew and trusted. I hoped the trust was reciprocal.
When I entered the bare stucco substation, his broad face generated a smile which resembled sunlight on a cliff.
“I hear you’ve been doing our work for us, Lew.”
“Somebody has to.”
“Uh-huh. You look kind of bedraggled. I keep an electric razor here, in case you want to borrow it.”
I rubbed my chin. It rasped. “Thanks, it can wait. Captain Royal tells me you handled the evidence in the Dolly Campion murder.”
“What evidence there was. We didn’t pick up too much. It wasn’t there to be picked up.”
Mungan had risen from his desk. He was a huge man who towered over me. It gave me the not unpleasant illusion of being small and fast, like a trained-down welterweight. He opened the swinging door at the end of the counter that divided the front office.
“Come on in and sit down. I’ll send out for coffee.”
“That can wait, too.”
“Sure, but we might as well be comfortable while we talk.” He summoned a young deputy from the back room and dispatched him for coffee. “What got you so involved in the Campion business?”
“Some Los Angeles people named Blackwell hired me to look into Campion’s background. He’d picked up their daughter Harriet in Mexico and was romancing her, under an alias. Three days ago they ran away together to Nevada, where she disappeared. The indications are that she’s his second victim, or his third.”
I told Mungan about the hat in the water, and about the dusty fate of Quincy Ralph Simpson. He listened earnestly, with the corners of his mouth drawn down like a bulldog’s, and said when I’d done: “The Blackwell girl I don’t know about. But I don’t see any reason why Campion would stab Ralph Simpson. It may be true what he said about Simpson lending him his papers to use. They were friends. When the Campions moved here last fall, it was Simpson who found them a house. Call it a house, but I guess it was all they could afford. They had a tough winter.”
“In what way?”
“Every way. They ran out of money. The wife was pregnant and he wasn’t working, unless you call painting pictures work. They had to draw welfare money for a while. The county cut ’em off when they found out Campion was using some of it to buy paints. Ralph Simpson helped them out as much as he could. I heard when the baby was born in March, he was the one paid the doctor.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Yeah. It crossed my mind at the time that maybe Simpson was the baby’s father. I asked him if he was, after Dolly got killed. He denied it.”
“It’s still a possibility. Simpson was a friend of Dolly’s before she knew Campion. I found out last night that Simpson was responsible for bringing them together in the first place. If Simpson got her pregnant and let Campion hold the bag, it would give Campion a motive for both killings. I realize that’s very iffy reasoning.”
“It is that.”
“Have you had any clear indication that Campion wasn’t the father?”
Mungan shook his ponderous head. “All the indications point the other way. Remember she was well along when he married her in September. A man doesn’t do that for a woman unless he’s the one.”
“I admit it isn’t usual. But Campion isn’t a usual man.”
“Thank the good Lord for that. If everybody was like him, the whole country would be headed for Hades in a handbasket. A hand-painted handbasket.” He laid his palm on the desk as if he was covering a hole card. “Personally I have my doubts that those two killings, Dolly and Simpson, are connected. I’m not saying they aren’t connected. I’m only saying I have my doubts.”
“They have to be connected, Pat. Simpson was killed within a couple of weeks of Dolly – a couple of weeks which he apparently spent investigating her death. Add to that the fact that he was found buried in her home town.”
“Citrus Junction?”
I nodded.
“Maybe he went to see the baby,” Mungan said thoughtfully. “The baby’s in Citrus Junction, you know. Dolly’s mother came and got him.”
“You seem to like my idea after all.”