“What time would that be?”
“Six. We eat an early supper.” Supper was a key word in her vocabulary. “Who shall I tell him?”
“Lew Archer. I’m the detective who brought Vicky Simpson here last Monday night. Is Mrs. Simpson still with you?”
“No. She only stayed the one night.” The woman said in a sudden gush of confidence: “Wesley’s such a good Samaritan, he doesn’t realize. Are you a real good friend of Mrs. Simpson’s?”
“No.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to insult her. She has her troubles. But it’s hard on an older woman having a younger woman in the house. A younger woman with all those troubles, it puts a strain on the marriage.” She ran her fingers over her curlers, as if they were holding the marriage precariously together. “You know how men are.”
“Not Wesley.”
“Yes, Wesley. He’s not immune. No man is. ” She looked ready to be disappointed in me at any moment. “Wesley was up half the night letting her cry on his shoulder. Heating milk. Making a grilled cheese sandwich at four A.M. He hasn’t made me a sandwich in ten years. So after she woke up at noon and I gave her her lunch I tactfully suggested that she should try the hotel. Wesley says I acted hardhearted. I say I was only heading off trouble in the marriage.”
“What’s she using for money?”
“Her boss wired her an advance on her wages, and I guess the boys in the courthouse chipped in some. Mrs. Vicky Simpson is comfortably ensconced.”
“Where?”
“The Valencia Hotel, on Main Street.”
It had stood there for forty or fifty years, a three-story cube of bricks that had once been white. Old men in old hats were watching the street through the front window. Their heads turned in unison to follow my progress across the dim lobby. It was so quiet I could hear their necks, or their chairs, creak.
There was nobody on duty at the desk. I punched the handbell. It didn’t work. One of the old men rose from his chair near the window and shuffled past me through a door at the back. He reappeared behind the desk, adjusting a glossy brown toupee which he had substituted for his hat. It settled low on his forehead.
“Yessir?”
“Is Mrs. Simpson in?”
He turned to inspect the bank of pigeonholes behind him. The back of his neck was naked as a plucked chicken’s.
“Yessir. She’s in.”
“Tell her there’s someone who wants to speak to her.”
“No telephone in her room. I guess I could go up and tell her,” he said doubtfully.
“I’ll go. What’s her number?”
“Three-oh-eight on the third floor. But we don’t like gentlemen visitors in a lady’s room.” Somehow his toupee made this remark sound lowbrow and obscene.
“I’m no gentleman. I’m a detective.”
“I see.”
He and his friends by the window watched me go up the stairs. I was the event of the day. A red bulb lit the third-floor corridor. I tapped on the door of 308.
“Who is it?” Vicky said in a dull voice.
“Lew Archer. Remember me?”
Bedsprings made a protesting noise. She opened the door and peered out. Her face had thinned.
“What do you want?”
“Some talk.”
“I’m all run out of talk.”
Her eyes were enormous and vulnerable. I could see myself mirrored in their pupils, a tiny red-lit man caught in amber, twice.
“Let me in, Vicky. I need your help.”
She shrugged and walked away from the open door, sprawling on the bed in a posture that seemed deliberately ugly. Her breasts and hips stood out under her black dress like protuberances carved from something hard and durable, wood or bone. A Gideon Bible lay open on the bed. I saw when I sat down in the chair beside it that Vicky had been reading the Book of Job.
“I didn’t know you were a Bible reader.”
“There’s lots of things you don’t know about me.”
“That’s true. Why didn’t you tell me Ralph was a friend of the Campions?”
“That should be easy to figure out. I didn’t want you to know.”
“But why?”
“It’s none of your business.”
“We have business in common, Vicky. We both want to get this mess straightened out.”
“It’ll never get straightened out. Ralph’s dead. You can’t change that.”
“Was he involved in Dolly’s murder? Is that why you covered for him?”
“I didn’t cover for him.”
“Of course you did. You must have recognized Campion from the description I gave you. You must have known that Dolly had been murdered. You knew that Ralph was close to her.”
“He wasn’t – not in the way you mean.”
“In what way was he close to her?”
“He was more like her financial adviser,” she said in a halting voice.
“Dolly had no use for a financial adviser. She was stony broke.”
“That’s what you think. I happen to know she was loaded at the time she was killed. Ralph told me she had at least a thousand dollars in cash. She didn’t know what to do with it, so she asked Ralph.”
“You must be mistaken, Vicky. The Campions had no money. I was told that Ralph had to pay the doctor when their child was born.”
“He didn’t have to. He had a good day at the race track and gave them the money. When Ralph won a little money he thought he was Santa Claus. Don’t think I didn’t put up a squawk. But she paid him back after all.”
“When?”
“Just before she was killed. Out of the money she had. That’s how he financed his trip to Tahoe.”
It was a peculiar story, peculiar enough to be true.
“Did Ralph actually see all the money Dolly claimed she had?”
“He saw it. He didn’t count it or anything, but he saw it. She asked him to take it and hold it for her, so she could make a down payment on a tract house. Ralph didn’t want the responsibility. He advised her to put it in the bank, but she was afraid Bruce would find out, and it would be gone with the wind. Like the other money – the money she had when he married her.”
“I didn’t know she had any.”
“What do you think he married her for? She had plenty, according to Ralph, another thousand anyway. Bruce took it and blew it. She was afraid he’d do the same with the new money.”
“Where did all the money come from?”
“Ralph said she got it out of a man. She wasn’t saying who.”
“Was the man the father of her child?”
She lowered her eyes demurely. “I always thought Bruce was the father.”
“Bruce denied it.”
“I never heard that.”
“I did, Vicky. Do you have any idea who the father was if it wasn’t Bruce?”
“No.”
“Could it have been Ralph?”
“No. There was nothing between him and Dolly. For one thing, he had too much respect for Bruce.”
“But the child was conceived long before she married Campion. Also you tell me she confided in Ralph about her money problems. Didn’t you say she wanted him to look after her thousand dollars?”
“Yes, and maybe he should have.” She glanced around the little room as if someone might be spying at the keyhole or the window. She lowered her voice to a whisper: “I think she was killed for that money.”
“By Bruce, you mean?”
“By him, or somebody else.”
“Did Ralph tell the police about it?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t either?”
“Why should I ask for trouble? You get enough trouble in this life without coming out and asking for it.”
I rose and stood over her. Late afternoon sunlight slanted in through the window. She sat rigid with her legs under her, as if the shafts of light had transfixed her neck and shoulders.
“You were afraid Ralph killed her.”