“Harriet finally gave me the money for the flight. She said that she would join me in Mexico later, and we could pretend to be strangers, and pick up where we’d left off. We could stay in Mexico or go further down into South America.” He turned from the window – his face had been opened by the light. “I suppose she saw her chance to sew me up for life. And I was tempted, again. I’m a very ambivalent guy.”
“I’m wondering about Harriet’s motive. You suggested she was protecting her father. Did she know, at that time, that he had murdered Dolly?”
“I don’t see how she could have.” He fingered the scratches on his face. “Look how she reacted when I told her about my suspicions the other night.”
“Just when did you develop those suspicions?”
“It happened over a period of time. Ralph Simpson brought up the name before I left Luna Bay. He’d seen Dolly with Blackwell last summer. Ralph fancied himself as a detective, and he was very interested in a leather button that was found at the scene of the crime. The police mentioned it, too. Do you know anything about that button?”
“Too much.” I summarized the history of the wandering topcoat.
“So Blackwell killed Ralph.”
“He confessed the murder this morning, along with the others.”
“Poor old Ralph.” Campion lowered himself into a chair and sat for a while in blank-eyed silence. “Ralph should never have got mixed up with me. I’m a moral typhoid carrier.”
“It’s a thought,” I said. “But you were telling me about your suspicions of Blackwell and how they grew.”
After another silence he went on: “Ralph started me thinking about Blackwell. Bits and pieces, associations, began to gather, and eventually I had a sort of Gestalt. Some of the things that went into it were Harriet’s interest in the baby, and the slip she made, if it was a slip, about her little brother. Then Dolly started getting money from somewhere, about the time that Harriet turned up at our house. I didn’t understand the relationship between Dolly and Harriet. It was pleasant enough on the surface, but there was a good deal of hostility under it.”
“That would be natural enough, if Dolly knew you were making love to Harriet.”
“She didn’t. Anyway, the relationship didn’t change from the first afternoon Harriet came to the house. They greeted each other like two sisters who hated each other but refused to admit it. I can see now why that would be: Harriet knew about Dolly’s fling with her father, and Dolly knew she knew.”
“You still haven’t told me when you found out.”
“I got my Gestalt one night in Mexico, after Harriet came. We were talking in my studio, and the subject of her father’s lodge at Tahoe came up, I don’t know how.” He turned his head to one side, as though he had overheard a distant voice. “Yes, I do know. She was hot on the marriage trail again, in spite of the fact that I was wanted for murder. She was fantasying about going back to the States where we could settle down in the lodge and live happily ever after. She got quite lyrical in her descriptions of the place. Oddly enough, I’d heard it all before.”
“From Harriet?”
“From Dolly. Dolly used to tell me stories about the sweet old lady who befriended her when she was on her uppers in State Line last summer. She gave me detailed descriptions of the sweet old lady’s house – the beamed ceilings, the lake view, the layout of the rooms. It suddenly hit me that it was Blackwell’s house and that Blackwell was the sweet old lady and probably the father of my–” he swallowed the word “–the father of Dolly’s child. I didn’t say a word to Harriet at the time, but I decided to go back to the States with her. I wanted to find out more about the sweet old lady. Well, I have.”
A complex grief controlled the lines of his face like a magnetic field.
31
GETTING OUT OF my cab at the San Francisco airport, I saw a woman I vaguely recognized standing with a suitcase in front of the main terminal building. She was wearing a tailored suit whose skirt was a little too long for the current fashion. It was Anne Castle, minus her earrings and with the addition of a rakish hat.
I took the suitcase out of her hand. “May I carry this, Miss Castle?”
She looked up at my face. Her own was so deeply shadowed by trouble that her vision seemed clouded. Slowly her brow cleared.
“Mr. Archer! I intended to look you up, and here you are. Surely you didn’t follow me from Los Angeles?”
“You seem to have followed me. I imagine we both came here for the same reason. Bruce Campion, alias Burke Damis.”
She nodded gravely. “I heard a report yesterday on the Guadalajara radio. I decided to drop everything and come here. I want to help him even if he did kill his wife. There must be mitigating circumstances.”
Her upward look was steady and pure. I caught myself on the point of envying Campion, wondering how the careless ones got women like her to care for them so deeply. I said: “Your friend is innocent. His wife was murdered by another man.”
“No!”
“Yes.”
Tears started in her eyes. She stood blind and smiling.
“We need to talk, Anne. Let’s go some place we can sit down.”
“But I’m on my way to see him.”
“It can wait. He’ll be busy with the police for some time. They have a lot of questions to ask him, and this is the first day he’s been willing to answer.”
“Why do they have to question him if he’s innocent?”
“He’s a material witness. He also has a good deal of explaining to do.”
“Because he used a false name to cross the border?”
“That doesn’t concern the local police. It’s the business of the Justice Department. I’m hoping they won’t press charges. A man who’s been wrongly indicted for murder has certain arguments on his side – what you called mitigating circumstances.”
“Yes,” she said. “We’ll fight it. Has he done anything else?”
“I can’t think of anything that’s actionable. But there are some things you should know before you see him. Let me buy you a drink.”
“I don’t think I’d better. I haven’t been sleeping too well, and I have to keep my wits about me. Could we have coffee?”
We went upstairs to the restaurant, and over several cups of coffee I told her the whole story of the case. It made more sense in the telling than it had in the acting out. Reflected in her deep eyes, her subtle face, it seemed to be transformed from a raffish melodrama into a tragedy of errors in which Campion and the others had been caught. But I didn’t whitewash him. I thought she deserved to know the worst about him, including his sporadic designs on Harriet’s money and his partial responsibility for her death.
She reached across the table and stopped me with her hand on my sleeve. “I saw Harriet last night.”
I looked at her closely. Her eyes were definite, alive with candor.
“Harriet isn’t dead. Her father must have been lying, or hallucinating. I know I wasn’t.”
“Where did you see her?”
“In the Guadalajara airport, when I went in to make my reservation. It was about nine-thirty last night. She was waiting for her bag at the end of the ticket counter. I heard her call out that it was azul – blue – and I knew her voice. She’d evidently just come in on the Los Angeles plane.”
“Did you speak to her?”
“I tried to. She didn’t recognize me, or pretended not to. She turned away very brusquely and ran out to the taxi stands. I didn’t follow her.”
“Why not?”
She answered carefully: “I felt I had no right to interfere with her. I was a little frightened of her, too. She had that terribly bright-faced look. I don’t know if I’m making myself clear, but I’ve seen that look on other people who were far out.”