“A good one or a phony?”
“You can find that out quicker than I can.”
Mungan stood up and looked down the rocky slopes of his face at me. “Whyn’t you give me the word on it in the first place?”
“I gave the word to Royal last night. He wasn’t interested. I thought I’d wait and see if you were.”
“Well, I am. But if this is no phony, why did Campion hold it out until now?”
“Ask him.”
“I think I will.”
He dropped the leather button he had been playing with on his desk. It rolled onto the floor, and I picked it up.
“Is this part of the evidence, Pat?”
“I honestly don’t know. The baby had it in his fist when Mrs. Johnson found him in her car. She didn’t know where it came from. Neither did anybody else.”
I was still trying to remember where I had seen a button or buttons like it. I dredged deep in my memory, but all that came up was the smell of the sea and the sound of it.
“May I have this button?”
“Nope. I read a story once about a button solving a murder, and I have a special feeling about this button.”
“So have I.”
“But I’m holding onto it.” His smiling eyes narrowed on my face. “You sure you don’t want to borrow the use of my razor before you go?”
“I guess I’d better.”
He got the electric razor out of the bottom drawer of his desk. I took it into the washroom and shaved myself. All I uncovered was the same old trouble-prone face.
21
MUNGAN WAS GONE when I came out. I used his telephone to call Vicky Simpson’s house. No answer. The young deputy in the back room told me that so far as he knew Vicky was still in Citrus Junction waiting for the authorities to release her husband’s body. I turned in the U-drive car at the San Francisco airport, caught a jet to Los Angeles, picked up my own car at the airport there, and drove out through the wedding-smelling orange groves to Citrus Junction.
I went first to see the baby. His grandmother lived on the west side of town in the waste that the highway builders had created. It was mid-afternoon when I got there. Earth movers were working in the dust like tanks in a no man’s land.
An overgrown pittasporum hedge shielded the house from the road. The universal dust had made its leaves as grey as aspen. The house was a two-story frame building which needed paint. Holes in the screen door had been repaired with string. I rattled it with my fist.
The woman who appeared behind the screen looked young to be a grandmother. The flouncy dress she wore, and her spike heels, were meant to emphasize her slender figure. She had a blue-eyed baby face to which the marks of time clung like an intricate spider web. She was blonder than the picture I’d seen of her daughter.
“Mrs. Stone?”
“I’m Mrs. Stone.”
I told her my name and occupation. “May I come in and talk to you for a bit?”
“What about?”
“Your daughter Dolly and what happened to her. I know it must be a painful subject–”
“Painful subject is right. I don’t see any sense in going over and over the same old ground. You people know who killed her as well as me. Instead of coming around torturing me, why don’t you go and catch that man? He has to be some place.”
“I took Campion last night, Mrs. Stone. He’s being held in Redwood City.”
A hungry eagerness deepened the lines in her face and aged her suddenly. “Has he confessed?”
“Not yet. We need more information. I’m comparatively new on the case, and I’d appreciate any help you can give me.”
“Sure. Come in.”
She unhooked the screen door and led me across a hallway into her living room. It was closely blinded, almost dark. Instead of raising a blind, she turned on a standing lamp.
“Excuse the dust on everything. It’s hard to keep a decent house with that road work going on. Stone thought we should sell, but we found out we couldn’t get our money out of it. The lucky ones were the people across the way that got condemned by the State. But they’re not widening on this side.”
An undersong of protest ran through everything she said, and she had reason. Grey dust rimed the furniture; even without it the furniture would have been shabby. I sat on a prolapsed chair and watched her arrange herself on the chesterfield. She had the faintly anachronistic airs of a woman who had been good-looking but had found no place to use her looks except the mirror.
At the moment I was the mirror, and she smiled into me intensively. “What do you want me to tell you?”
“We’ll start with your son-in-law. Did you ever meet him?”
“Once. Once was enough. Jack and me invited the two of them down for Christmas. We had a hen turkey and all the trimmings. But that Bruce Campion acted like he was on a slumming expedition. He hauled poor Dolly out of here so fast you’d think there was a quarantine sign on the house. Little did he know that some of the best people in town are our good friends.”
“Did you quarrel with him?”
“You bet I did. What did he have to act so snooty about? Dolly told me they were living in a garage, and we’ve owned our own house here for twenty-odd years. So I asked him what he planned to do for her. When was he going to get a job and so on? He said he married her, didn’t he, and that was all he planned to do for her, said he already had a job doing his own work. So I asked him how much money he made and he said not very much, but they were getting along with the help of friends. I told him my daughter wasn’t a charity case, and he said that’s what I thought. Imagine him talking like that to her own mother, and her six months pregnant at the time. I tried to talk her into cutting her losses and staying here with us, but Dolly wouldn’t. She was too loyal.”
Mrs. Stone had the total recall of a woman with a grievance. I interrupted her flow of words: “Were they getting along with each other?”
“She was getting along with him. It took a saint to do it and that’s what she was, a saint.” She rummaged in a sewing basket beside her. “I want to show you a letter she wrote me after Christmas. If you ever saw a devoted young wife it was her.”
She produced a crumpled letter addressed to her and postmarked “Luna Bay, Dec. 27.” It was written in pencil on a sheet of sketching paper by an immature hand:
Dear Elizabeth, I’m sorry you and Bruce had to fight. He is moody but he is really A-okay if you only know him. We appresiate the twenty – it will come in handy to buy a coat – I only hope Bruce does not get to it first – he spends so much on his painting – I realy need a coat. Its colder up here than it was in Citrus J. I realy appresiate you asking me to stay (I’m a poet and don’t know it!) but a girl has to stick with her “hubby” thru thick and thin – after all Bruce stuck with me. Maybe he is hard to get along with but he is a lot better than “no hubby at all.” Dont you honestly think hes cute? Besides some of the people we know think his pictures are real great and he will make a “killing–” then you will be glad I stuck with Bruce.
Love to Jack
Dolly (Mrs. Bruce Campion)
“Doesn’t it tear your heart out?” Mrs. Stone said, plucking at the neighborhood of hers. “I mean the way she idolized him and all?”
I assumed a suitably grim expression. It came naturally enough. I was thinking of the cultural gap between Dolly and Harriet, and the flexibility of the man who had straddled it.