“Suddenly your affairs are at the center of this case. When I found out tonight that you knew Dolly Stone and her parents, it knocked most of my ideas sideways. I’m trying to work up a new set of ideas, and I can’t do it without your co-operation.”
“I’m still very much in the dark. I’m not even sure what case we’re talking about.”
“It’s all one case,” I said, “Harriet’s disappearance and Dolly’s death and the murder of Ralph Simpson, who was stabbed with an icepick–”
“My icepick?”
“That’s the police hypothesis. I share it. I’m not accusing you of doing the actual stabbing.”
“How good of you.”
“The fact remains that you knew Ralph Simpson, you were almost certainly aware of his death, and you said nothing about it.”
“Is this the same Ralph Simpson who worked for us at Tahoe in the spring?”
“The same. A day or two after he left you he was stabbed to death and buried in the back yard of the house you used to own in Citrus Junction.”
“But that’s insane, utterly insane.”
“You knew about it, didn’t you?”
“I did not. You’re quite mistaken.”
“There’s an account of the Simpson killing on the front page of the Citrus Junction paper in your sitting room.”
“I haven’t read it. I take the paper, to keep track of old friends, but I’m afraid I seldom look at it. I haven’t even glanced at it this week.”
I couldn’t tell if she was lying. Her face had become a stiff mask which refused to tell what went on in the mind behind it. Her eyes had veiled themselves. Guilt can effect those changes. So can innocent fear.
“You have sharp eyes, don’t you, Mr. Archer? Unfriendly eyes.”
“Objective eyes, I hope.”
“I’m not fond of your objectivity. I thought there was a – degree of confidence between us.”
“There was.”
“You put that emphatically in the past tense. Since you’ve been operating with my money, operating on me in fact, I would have expected a little more tolerance, and sympathy. You realize my connection with Dolly proves nothing whatever against me.”
“I’d be glad to see that proved.”
“How can I prove it?”
“Tell me more about Dolly. For instance, what were the antisocial tendencies you noticed in her?”
“Must I? I’ve only just learned of her death. It’s distressing to rake over the past under the circumstances.”
“The past is the key to the present.”
“You’re quite a philosopher,” she said with some irony.
“I’m simply a detective with quite a few murder cases under my belt. People start out young on the road to becoming murderers. They start out equally young on the road to becoming victims. When the two roads intersect, you have a violent crime.”
“Are you suggesting that Dolly was a predestined victim?”
“Not predestined, but prepared. What prepared her, Mrs. Blackwell?”
“I didn’t, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She paused, and took a deep breath. “Very well, I’ll try to give you a serious answer. I was concerned about Dolly, from the time she was four or five. She wasn’t relating too well to other children. Her relationship with adults wasn’t right, either, and it got worse. It showed up particularly in her contacts with my husband. Dolly was a pretty little thing, and her father had treated her seductively and then rejected her. It’s a common pattern. The Stones aren’t bad people, but they’re ignorant people, lacking in insight. They were our good neighbors, however, and Ronald and I believed in helping our neighbors as best we could. We tried to provide Dolly with a more normal family constellation–”
“And yourselves with a daughter?”
“That’s an unkind remark.” Her anger showed through her mask. She forced it back. “It’s true, we couldn’t have children; Ronald had a diabetic condition. I’m also aware of the ease with which good white magic turns into bad black magic. But we made no attempt to take Dolly from her parents, emotionally or otherwise. We merely tried to give her some things they couldn’t – books and music and recreation and the company of understanding people.”
“Then your husband died, and you moved away.”
“I’d already lost her by that time,” she said defensively. “It wasn’t I who failed Dolly. She’d begun to steal money from my purse and lie about it, and she did other things I prefer not to go into. She’s dead: nil nisi bonum.”
“I wish you would go into the other things.”
“I’ll put it this way. I wasn’t able to protect her against degrading influences – I only had a part of her life after all. She ran with the wrong crowd in high school and picked up gutter ideas of sex. Dolly was already mature at the age of fifteen.”
She didn’t go on. Her mouth was grave, her eyes watchful. It was possible, I thought, that Dolly had made a play for Ronald Jaimet before he died. It was possible that Jaimet had fallen for it. A daughterless man in middle age can take a sudden fall, all the way down to the bottom of the hole. It would be a suicidal hole, but suicide came easily to a diabetic. He simply had to forget his dose and his diet.
Being a murder victim came easily to a diabetic, too.
“You have that look again,” Isobel Blackwell said. “That objective look, as you call it. I hope I’m not the object of your thoughts.”
“In a way you are. I was thinking about Ronald Jaimet’s death.”
“Apparently you’ve come here tonight determined to spare me nothing. If you must know, Ronald died by accident. And incidentally, since I think I know what’s on your mind, Ronald’s relations with Dolly were pure – wonderfully pure. I knew Ronald.”
“I didn’t. What were the circumstances of his death? I understand Mark was with him.”
“They were on a pack trip in the Sierra. Ronald fell and broke his ankle. What was worse, he broke his insulin needle. By the time Mark got him down the hill to Bishop, he was in a coma. He died in the Bishop hospital, before I could get to him.”
“So you have the story from Mark.”
“It’s the truth. Ronald and Mark were good friends as well as cousins. Ronald was the younger of the two, and he’d always admired Mark. I could never have married Mark if that hadn’t been the case.”
Under the increase in pressure of my questions, she seemed to feel the need to justify the main actions of her life. I brought her back to Ronald Jaimet’s death.
“Diabetics don’t usually go on pack trips in the mountains. Aren’t they supposed to lead a fairly sheltered life?”
“Some of them do. Ronald couldn’t. I realize, I realized then, that it was risky for him to expose himself to accidents. But I couldn’t bring myself to try and stop him. His annual hike was important to him, as a man. And Mark was there to look after him.”
I sat for a minute and listened to the echoes of her last sentence. Perhaps she was hearing them, too.
“How did Ronald happen to take a spill?”
“He slipped and fell on a steep trail.” She jerked her head sideways as if to deflect the image of his fall. “Please don’t try to tell me that it was accident-proneness or unconscious suicide. I’ve been over all that in my mind many times. Ronald had a great sense of life, in spite of his illness. He was happy in his life. I made him happy.”
“I’m sure you did.”
She went on stubbornly, justifying her life and its meanings: “And please don’t try to tell me that Mark had anything to do with Ronald’s death. The two men were deeply fond of each other. Mark was like an older brother to Ronald. He carried him on his back for miles over rugged trails, back to the jeep. It took him most of a day and a night to bring him down the hill. When Harriet and I finally reached the hospital – she drove me up to Bishop that day – Mark was completely broken up. He blamed himself for not taking better care of Ronald. So you see, you’re wandering far afield when you suggest that Mark–”