Reno Rendezvous, page 10
12
The door opened slowly. I had a sudden idea that everything had gone slow-motion—even from the tense waiting look in Judy’s face as she watched the door, like waiting in the movies for the headless phantom to appear.
It appeared at last, but it wasn’t headless. It was my friend Vicki Ray the hat check girl, and the reason she was moving slowly is that she couldn’t possibly have done anything else and kept her superb and very formal balance.
She steadied herself against the door frame for an instant, closed the door with tremendous carefulness, and came in. She gave us a gallant little salute from the brim of her white hat and sat down so cautiously that she wouldn’t have broken if she had been glass. Then she just sat there, looking at Judy, and Judy looking at her.
Neither of them spoke, but I knew they were communicating in some way. It was like watching a broadcast through the glass windows at Radio City without a radio hookup. I didn’t, oddly enough, have any feeling that either of them wanted me to go, or that what they were thinking would ever be put in words even if I did go.
At last Vicki said, controlling her voice remarkably and speaking even slower than she did when she was sober, “The cops are looking for a girl that a wop lives out by the race track saw running along the road a little after two this morning. He’s sure of the time, because he’s a waiter at a place in Center Street and he gets off at two. I understand he says he wouldn’t recognize her, it was dark, but he knows it was a woman, he heard her footsteps.—So he didn’t see her so much as hear her.”
Judy didn’t say anything.
“It’s too bad Dex had so many women in his life,” Vicki’s voice went on, preternaturally slow. “A girl that works up at Tahoe says when he was here three years ago, getting his divorce, he used to throw parties up there that made even Reno rub its eyes.”
Judy stiffened back against the sofa. “So what?” she asked, in a flat voice that I hardly recognized.
Vicki drew herself out of the chair onto her feet, and steadied herself against the table.
“If we could show he knew dope peddlers enough, and shills, and marathon dancers, and divorcées hiding out in tourist camps that call themselves guest ranches, well . . .”
She started toward the door. “Well, I’m just interested, that’s all.”
She got to the door and outside, and closed it carefully.
I looked at Judy. Her slim body had relaxed, her eyes were closed, her brown little hands lay listlessly in her lap.
The door opened again, very slowly, and Vicki’s head came slowly back.
“Say—who’s the guy Baker that Kaye Gorman drove out to the airport in Whitey’s car this afternoon?”
I didn’t look at Judy, but I could feel her stiffen again with the suddenness of an electric shock.
“I don’t know—why?” she said sharply.
“I thought you did—the telephone girl said he’d been calling you all day. She figured he’s somebody that knew you.”
She closed the door again. Judy got up slowly and picked up the sheaf of telephone slips, and tore them up, slowly, into a thousand pieces, and let them slip through her fingers into the waste basket. Then she turned around and gave me a twisted little smile. “Well,” she said, “that’s that. And Judy’s going to bed.”
I went to my door. I didn’t kiss her good-night. I couldn’t have, possibly. She had erected an invisible but perfectly impenetrable wall about herself that excluded any softness or sympathy.
At the door I turned.
“Judy,” I said. “I don’t believe you killed Dexter Cromwell. But there’s a lot of evidence that’s very damning indeed. And I dare say I’m being pretty stuffy and old-fashioned . . . but I would like to hear you say you didn’t do it—with your own lips.”
She looked at me very steadily for a moment. Then she said, “Would you believe it if I did?”
“Would I?” I thought desperately. I think she saw the stab of doubt in my eyes, because she smiled faintly.
“You don’t have to, darling, because I haven’t said it—have I?”
“No,” I said.
“No,” she repeated softly. And she added, after a moment, “and I’m not going to—not to you.”
She stood there, erect and young and very lovely, more like a Jeanne d’Arc than a . . . I tried to think of the name of a woman who had murdered her lover, but my brain was foggy and numb. So I said, “Good night, Judy,” went into my room and closed the door.
I went to the window without turning on the light, and stood there looking down on a paved patio where a lighted fountain played over potted ferns in a pool. The patio was empty. Music from the bar came faintly through the closed French windows. I was thinking of Judy . . . and I was aware now for the first time that I didn’t really, in my heart, believe she had killed Dex Cromwell. I tried to analyze that feeling, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t reasonable. Reason was all against it—reason, and evidence. The gold hairs clutched in his dead hand, the miner’s candle pick, the shaft covered with blood, in her clothes hamper, were objective and irrefutable. She had been there, on the race track, near him, when he died. The weapon that had killed him was hers. She had bought it the day before. It was in her room . . . in a place that would not be disturbed until the next day, and that actually had been disturbed sooner only by the accident of the night maid’s mother being ill.
Then there was all the rest of it. Her jealousy of Kaye Gorman, her wild quarrel with the husband she was divorcing, just before it all happened. And the thing I’d been trying to avoid thinking about all day and had to face at last: the long, long sleep that had followed all this, as if some tremendous emotional crisis had been reached, and Judy, who hadn’t slept apparently for days, had slept, without taking off her clothes or getting into bed.
While I stood there looking down into the court, this conviction of mine gathering coherence, I saw the door of the bar open and a couple come out. Even in the half-light of the orange flambeaux against the walls I recognized the white head and spindly legs of one of them, and in another moment I saw the glint of the red hair of the woman with him. They strolled to the far end of the patio and stopped. Whitey looked up at the windows, mostly dark now except for those along the corridor, on the side opposite me.
Then a rather strange thing happened. Mrs. de Courcey opened her bag and handed him what was evidently a roll of bills, for he counted them off rapidly before putting them in his pocket. Then, almost instantly, he crossed the patio again and disappeared into the bar.
Mrs. de Courcey stood under the potted palms a little while, lighted a cigarette, flicked the match into the pool under the fountain and sat down in one of the white-and-yellow chromium-armed sofas, her elegant black figure outlined against the light ground. From time to time she bent forward and glanced at the door to the bar. She must be waiting for Whitey to come back, I thought, though what he’d be likely to be getting with that much money I could only make the most lurid guesses at.
I stood there, spying on her, I suppose, just as Steve Ewing’s camera had spied on Judy and Clem Bonner. I didn’t think of it as that. Being a natural-born busybody, it never occurred to me, somehow, to go away from the window and turn on my light and mind my own very upsetting affairs.
Mrs. de Courcey stood up, and moved forward, her hands outstretched—not to Whitey bringing her any of the things I’d thought of, but to a man coming from the lobby side of the patio. They met by the fountain. For a moment I thought she was going to kiss him . . . and then there was the bang of a door and a stentorian throat-clearing.
The man turned quickly. I didn’t need to see Sergeant Buck’s large and fantastic form come forward. I already knew it was Colonel Primrose that Mrs. de Courcey had been waiting for in the patio, and that Sergeant Buck was there on the job in his self-appointed role of duenna.
I pulled down my shade—wondering a little if this was another red herring—and turned around. My travelling clock on the table said quarter to one. Somehow the idea that it was really quarter to one, and hence time to go to bed, never entered my mind. Like the fancy dress for the Fourth of July Rodeo, and the divorce parties, and gardenias, and slot machines in the grocery stores, it was just part of Reno. I haven’t a doubt there are large numbers of people there who go to bed and sleep like Christians—even divorcées, I suppose—but they just happened to be people whom if I met at all I never knew personally. Everybody I knew—except Mr. Tucker, whom I hadn’t at this point met—could be found at any time of the early morning somewhere in the district bounded by Lake Tahoe and Carson City on the one hand and Pyramid Lake and Virginia City on the other, with Reno lying neatly in the center. And it was usually easy to say just where, when you knew them, which I didn’t, not then.
I got out a jacket and was just turning out my light when the door opened and Judy came in. She was still dressed. I began to wonder if I’d ever see her in anything but those wrinkled jodhpurs and scuffed jodhpur boots and crumpled shirt on which the tears had dried in spots. She was pale and there were big circles under her eyes, and under the remnants of her scarlet lipstick her lips were bloodless.
“I know you want to go to bed, Grace,” she said wanly. “But would you—if you don’t mind—put this in the mail box for me . . . outside the hotel? I’m afraid to put it in the chute.”
She held out a stamped envelope.
“You see, Grace—nobody must know Clem was here. It’s terribly important!”
I took the letter and put it in my pocket, not really understanding.
“Kaye Gorman knows he was here—that’s somebody already,” I said.
She gave a strange little laugh. “She won’t tell.”
“I hope you’re right,” I said.
“I know I am. But you’ll do that, won’t you?”
“Surely.”
She turned back to the door, and stopped again. “You’ll forgive me, Grace, won’t you, being so . . . so difficult. That’s what Dad calls it when I’m being completely foul. But you see—it’s not just . . .”
“Listen, darling,” I interrupted. “You’re being very sweet, and I’m very fond of you. And if there are things you want to keep to yourself, do it and don’t worry about me. But don’t make yourself any unhappier than you have to . . . and go take off those clothes and take a bath and go to bed. Okay?”
She looked at me a moment or two and nodded. “Okay,” she whispered.
I closed my door and locked it and started down the hall. As I did, a man who had obviously just stepped out into the corridor, as he wasn’t there before I’d turned around to lock my door, stepped back into the maids’ supply room and pulled the door to. My heart sank with a cold plop. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me that the police would of course be watching her, and that while she might not be technically under arrest, practically she had to be, since that blood-stained weapon had been found in her possession.
For a moment I started to go back and stay with her. Then I decided it would be better if I didn’t. I’ve always thought it must be very difficult for a doomed man having somebody, even—or especially—his spiritual adviser, with him to the end. And the policeman there in the maids’ cubby hole cast a shadow of doom over Judy Bonner that all my conviction of her essential innocence could not quite dispel. Nevertheless I nodded to him when he peered out, to show him I knew he was there and why, and perhaps from the primitive belief that if you speak to the devil when you meet him you exorcise him. I’ve often wondered if that’s why colored people in country lanes always speak to strangers.
This man was neither the devil nor strange—I’d seen him already at the race track. Nevertheless, and not entirely without guile, I said to him, “You’ll see that no one disturbs my niece while I’m out, won’t you? She’s trying to get some rest.”
Which, like practically everything else I did in Reno, shows with a brilliant clarity the essential wisdom of minding one’s own business, or possibly just letting well enough alone.
“Sure, I’ll take care of her, Mrs. Latham—don’t you worry. You’ll be in the bar, I guess, if anybody wants you?” he added innocently.
“That’s right,” I said. “Either a bar,” I added to myself, “or a gambling hell, or just roaming the streets.”
There weren’t many people in the lobby as I went through—a man in cowboy clothes playing blackjack with the night desk clerk, a little crowd of people all more or less sober standing around talking.
I went out into the brilliantly lighted street. It was cool and quiet. Across the street the big sign of the Riverside Hotel did its maddening routine of white, pink, blue and back again, over and over. I started across the bridge, thinking I’d better not go to the post office directly for fear they were watching me too. Halfway across I heard footsteps and looked back. Sergeant Buck was coming after me in his familiar double-quick, so I waited. He came to a smart halt, and while he didn’t actually salute, I had the impression of being pretty military myself and rather receiving intelligence in line of battle.
“I attended to that matter of the picture, ma’am,” he said.
I said, “Thank you—so much! Where is it?”
“It got accidentally burned up,” he answered, and spat neatly down into the Truckee.
“That’s too bad,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered with a certain sinister relish. “Irregardless of the fact it wasn’t of her in what you’d call an uncompromising position exactly, it don’t hurt to pin the ears back on those babies.”
Not knowing who the man in the picture was, Sergeant Buck could not possibly know just how uncompromising—in a very literal sense—that picture had been. I wondered for a moment if I should tell him, and thought not.
“I’ll be getting back now, ma’am,” Sergeant Buck said. “And I wouldn’t go traipsing around the streets alone, if I was you. It ain’t safe, and it ain’t ladylike.”
Which in Reno is wrong. A lone woman in the streets and in night clubs and gambling joints is safer, I should think, than she might be alone in her own apartment in New York. Physically safer . . . and the moral danger she runs, in the line of how much she drinks and gambles, is entirely up to her. And the unique conventions of a place where there are so many lone women make it perfectly ladylike for her to go anywhere by herself. It may not be fun, but it’s correct. And ordinarily she doesn’t stay alone more than a moment or two. As I discovered practically immediately.
13
I posted Judy’s letter in the mail box on the corner of Virginia Street. The neon-lighted oasis of the River House reminded me of the sandwich I’d left untouched on the table after my encounter with Mr. Ewing, and I turned along First Street and went in. A crowd of people in varying degrees of Westernalia were dancing to the aching moan of a cowboy orchestra from Hollywood. Half a dozen little groups were seated on high leather-topped stools at the bar. The news of Dex Cromwell’s murder had spread to all the regular customers. Everybody—even the dealers in a little huddle at the end of the deserted row of brightly lighted gambling tables—was discussing it . . . in discreet guarded undertones, so that the dancers, who were mostly transient visitors, neither members of the divorce colony nor the town, weren’t aware that anything out of the ordinary had happened. It is part of the code of Reno to protect its visitors from open gossip and unfavorable publicity. There’s a constant underground struggle that goes on between the people who profit by keeping Reno’s veneer of respectability polished and intact, and the Steve Ewings’s and newspaper gossip writers snooping about for a juicy paragraph for the outside world to read for breakfast and say with the Pharisee, “I am not as other men.”
As I came in someone looked around, and there was a little hush. Frenchy, the proprietor, came forward and greeted me, and Whitey disengaged himself from a little group at the end of the bar and came forward too.
“I’d like something to eat,” I said.
Whitey, oddly enough considering the apparent state he’d been in at the Washoe Bar, was quite sober.
“Can I sit with you?” he asked. If I hadn’t just happened to notice the little sign he gave one of the men at the bar I should have thought nothing but the finest motives of sympathy and friendship motivated him—until I got my bill for his supper that he didn’t eat and his wine that he didn’t drink and a good deal of rye that he did.
“Listen, Whitey,” I said, when I’d ordered. “How long have you known Dex Cromwell?”
His white eyelashes blinked rapidly. I didn’t realize that according to the Reno code I shouldn’t have come right out with such a question at such a time. He wrinkled his sunburned brow.
“Gee, now, Miz’ Latham, let’ see. I guess quite some time,” he said. “First time was in L. A. when I was working in the movies, about ten years ago. Then I come up here when he was getting his divorce, about three years ago.”
“Did you know Mrs. Gorman then too?”
“Sure, I knew Kaye. Kaye’s a real lady.”
“And Vicki—I mean was she here?”
“Jeez, no, Miz’ Latham—Vicki wasn’t here then.”
“But she knew Dex before he came out this time, didn’t she?”
“I don’t think so. But don’t pay no attention to Vicki, Miz’ Latham—she’s nuttier’n a fruit cake.”
At that moment Vicki came in from the other room, behind her Kaye Gorman and Joe Lucas, his two big hands on her shoulders, pushing her inside. He saw me first and gave me a broad good-natured grin. Kaye Gorman, who seemed intensely aware of everything he did, followed his eye quickly. Her baby face tightened, then she smiled politely—as she would have done in the East—and twisted her shoulder to shake Joe’s hands off.
“If that ain’t the payoff!” Whitey muttered angrily. “The son of a buck!”
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Look at that dirty chisellin’ rat!”
He pushed his chair back with a restrained violence and got up, muttering and mumbling. “I’m going to clear out of here, Miz’ Latham. If she wants to be seen playin’ around that . . .”
The door opened slowly. I had a sudden idea that everything had gone slow-motion—even from the tense waiting look in Judy’s face as she watched the door, like waiting in the movies for the headless phantom to appear.
It appeared at last, but it wasn’t headless. It was my friend Vicki Ray the hat check girl, and the reason she was moving slowly is that she couldn’t possibly have done anything else and kept her superb and very formal balance.
She steadied herself against the door frame for an instant, closed the door with tremendous carefulness, and came in. She gave us a gallant little salute from the brim of her white hat and sat down so cautiously that she wouldn’t have broken if she had been glass. Then she just sat there, looking at Judy, and Judy looking at her.
Neither of them spoke, but I knew they were communicating in some way. It was like watching a broadcast through the glass windows at Radio City without a radio hookup. I didn’t, oddly enough, have any feeling that either of them wanted me to go, or that what they were thinking would ever be put in words even if I did go.
At last Vicki said, controlling her voice remarkably and speaking even slower than she did when she was sober, “The cops are looking for a girl that a wop lives out by the race track saw running along the road a little after two this morning. He’s sure of the time, because he’s a waiter at a place in Center Street and he gets off at two. I understand he says he wouldn’t recognize her, it was dark, but he knows it was a woman, he heard her footsteps.—So he didn’t see her so much as hear her.”
Judy didn’t say anything.
“It’s too bad Dex had so many women in his life,” Vicki’s voice went on, preternaturally slow. “A girl that works up at Tahoe says when he was here three years ago, getting his divorce, he used to throw parties up there that made even Reno rub its eyes.”
Judy stiffened back against the sofa. “So what?” she asked, in a flat voice that I hardly recognized.
Vicki drew herself out of the chair onto her feet, and steadied herself against the table.
“If we could show he knew dope peddlers enough, and shills, and marathon dancers, and divorcées hiding out in tourist camps that call themselves guest ranches, well . . .”
She started toward the door. “Well, I’m just interested, that’s all.”
She got to the door and outside, and closed it carefully.
I looked at Judy. Her slim body had relaxed, her eyes were closed, her brown little hands lay listlessly in her lap.
The door opened again, very slowly, and Vicki’s head came slowly back.
“Say—who’s the guy Baker that Kaye Gorman drove out to the airport in Whitey’s car this afternoon?”
I didn’t look at Judy, but I could feel her stiffen again with the suddenness of an electric shock.
“I don’t know—why?” she said sharply.
“I thought you did—the telephone girl said he’d been calling you all day. She figured he’s somebody that knew you.”
She closed the door again. Judy got up slowly and picked up the sheaf of telephone slips, and tore them up, slowly, into a thousand pieces, and let them slip through her fingers into the waste basket. Then she turned around and gave me a twisted little smile. “Well,” she said, “that’s that. And Judy’s going to bed.”
I went to my door. I didn’t kiss her good-night. I couldn’t have, possibly. She had erected an invisible but perfectly impenetrable wall about herself that excluded any softness or sympathy.
At the door I turned.
“Judy,” I said. “I don’t believe you killed Dexter Cromwell. But there’s a lot of evidence that’s very damning indeed. And I dare say I’m being pretty stuffy and old-fashioned . . . but I would like to hear you say you didn’t do it—with your own lips.”
She looked at me very steadily for a moment. Then she said, “Would you believe it if I did?”
“Would I?” I thought desperately. I think she saw the stab of doubt in my eyes, because she smiled faintly.
“You don’t have to, darling, because I haven’t said it—have I?”
“No,” I said.
“No,” she repeated softly. And she added, after a moment, “and I’m not going to—not to you.”
She stood there, erect and young and very lovely, more like a Jeanne d’Arc than a . . . I tried to think of the name of a woman who had murdered her lover, but my brain was foggy and numb. So I said, “Good night, Judy,” went into my room and closed the door.
I went to the window without turning on the light, and stood there looking down on a paved patio where a lighted fountain played over potted ferns in a pool. The patio was empty. Music from the bar came faintly through the closed French windows. I was thinking of Judy . . . and I was aware now for the first time that I didn’t really, in my heart, believe she had killed Dex Cromwell. I tried to analyze that feeling, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t reasonable. Reason was all against it—reason, and evidence. The gold hairs clutched in his dead hand, the miner’s candle pick, the shaft covered with blood, in her clothes hamper, were objective and irrefutable. She had been there, on the race track, near him, when he died. The weapon that had killed him was hers. She had bought it the day before. It was in her room . . . in a place that would not be disturbed until the next day, and that actually had been disturbed sooner only by the accident of the night maid’s mother being ill.
Then there was all the rest of it. Her jealousy of Kaye Gorman, her wild quarrel with the husband she was divorcing, just before it all happened. And the thing I’d been trying to avoid thinking about all day and had to face at last: the long, long sleep that had followed all this, as if some tremendous emotional crisis had been reached, and Judy, who hadn’t slept apparently for days, had slept, without taking off her clothes or getting into bed.
While I stood there looking down into the court, this conviction of mine gathering coherence, I saw the door of the bar open and a couple come out. Even in the half-light of the orange flambeaux against the walls I recognized the white head and spindly legs of one of them, and in another moment I saw the glint of the red hair of the woman with him. They strolled to the far end of the patio and stopped. Whitey looked up at the windows, mostly dark now except for those along the corridor, on the side opposite me.
Then a rather strange thing happened. Mrs. de Courcey opened her bag and handed him what was evidently a roll of bills, for he counted them off rapidly before putting them in his pocket. Then, almost instantly, he crossed the patio again and disappeared into the bar.
Mrs. de Courcey stood under the potted palms a little while, lighted a cigarette, flicked the match into the pool under the fountain and sat down in one of the white-and-yellow chromium-armed sofas, her elegant black figure outlined against the light ground. From time to time she bent forward and glanced at the door to the bar. She must be waiting for Whitey to come back, I thought, though what he’d be likely to be getting with that much money I could only make the most lurid guesses at.
I stood there, spying on her, I suppose, just as Steve Ewing’s camera had spied on Judy and Clem Bonner. I didn’t think of it as that. Being a natural-born busybody, it never occurred to me, somehow, to go away from the window and turn on my light and mind my own very upsetting affairs.
Mrs. de Courcey stood up, and moved forward, her hands outstretched—not to Whitey bringing her any of the things I’d thought of, but to a man coming from the lobby side of the patio. They met by the fountain. For a moment I thought she was going to kiss him . . . and then there was the bang of a door and a stentorian throat-clearing.
The man turned quickly. I didn’t need to see Sergeant Buck’s large and fantastic form come forward. I already knew it was Colonel Primrose that Mrs. de Courcey had been waiting for in the patio, and that Sergeant Buck was there on the job in his self-appointed role of duenna.
I pulled down my shade—wondering a little if this was another red herring—and turned around. My travelling clock on the table said quarter to one. Somehow the idea that it was really quarter to one, and hence time to go to bed, never entered my mind. Like the fancy dress for the Fourth of July Rodeo, and the divorce parties, and gardenias, and slot machines in the grocery stores, it was just part of Reno. I haven’t a doubt there are large numbers of people there who go to bed and sleep like Christians—even divorcées, I suppose—but they just happened to be people whom if I met at all I never knew personally. Everybody I knew—except Mr. Tucker, whom I hadn’t at this point met—could be found at any time of the early morning somewhere in the district bounded by Lake Tahoe and Carson City on the one hand and Pyramid Lake and Virginia City on the other, with Reno lying neatly in the center. And it was usually easy to say just where, when you knew them, which I didn’t, not then.
I got out a jacket and was just turning out my light when the door opened and Judy came in. She was still dressed. I began to wonder if I’d ever see her in anything but those wrinkled jodhpurs and scuffed jodhpur boots and crumpled shirt on which the tears had dried in spots. She was pale and there were big circles under her eyes, and under the remnants of her scarlet lipstick her lips were bloodless.
“I know you want to go to bed, Grace,” she said wanly. “But would you—if you don’t mind—put this in the mail box for me . . . outside the hotel? I’m afraid to put it in the chute.”
She held out a stamped envelope.
“You see, Grace—nobody must know Clem was here. It’s terribly important!”
I took the letter and put it in my pocket, not really understanding.
“Kaye Gorman knows he was here—that’s somebody already,” I said.
She gave a strange little laugh. “She won’t tell.”
“I hope you’re right,” I said.
“I know I am. But you’ll do that, won’t you?”
“Surely.”
She turned back to the door, and stopped again. “You’ll forgive me, Grace, won’t you, being so . . . so difficult. That’s what Dad calls it when I’m being completely foul. But you see—it’s not just . . .”
“Listen, darling,” I interrupted. “You’re being very sweet, and I’m very fond of you. And if there are things you want to keep to yourself, do it and don’t worry about me. But don’t make yourself any unhappier than you have to . . . and go take off those clothes and take a bath and go to bed. Okay?”
She looked at me a moment or two and nodded. “Okay,” she whispered.
I closed my door and locked it and started down the hall. As I did, a man who had obviously just stepped out into the corridor, as he wasn’t there before I’d turned around to lock my door, stepped back into the maids’ supply room and pulled the door to. My heart sank with a cold plop. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me that the police would of course be watching her, and that while she might not be technically under arrest, practically she had to be, since that blood-stained weapon had been found in her possession.
For a moment I started to go back and stay with her. Then I decided it would be better if I didn’t. I’ve always thought it must be very difficult for a doomed man having somebody, even—or especially—his spiritual adviser, with him to the end. And the policeman there in the maids’ cubby hole cast a shadow of doom over Judy Bonner that all my conviction of her essential innocence could not quite dispel. Nevertheless I nodded to him when he peered out, to show him I knew he was there and why, and perhaps from the primitive belief that if you speak to the devil when you meet him you exorcise him. I’ve often wondered if that’s why colored people in country lanes always speak to strangers.
This man was neither the devil nor strange—I’d seen him already at the race track. Nevertheless, and not entirely without guile, I said to him, “You’ll see that no one disturbs my niece while I’m out, won’t you? She’s trying to get some rest.”
Which, like practically everything else I did in Reno, shows with a brilliant clarity the essential wisdom of minding one’s own business, or possibly just letting well enough alone.
“Sure, I’ll take care of her, Mrs. Latham—don’t you worry. You’ll be in the bar, I guess, if anybody wants you?” he added innocently.
“That’s right,” I said. “Either a bar,” I added to myself, “or a gambling hell, or just roaming the streets.”
There weren’t many people in the lobby as I went through—a man in cowboy clothes playing blackjack with the night desk clerk, a little crowd of people all more or less sober standing around talking.
I went out into the brilliantly lighted street. It was cool and quiet. Across the street the big sign of the Riverside Hotel did its maddening routine of white, pink, blue and back again, over and over. I started across the bridge, thinking I’d better not go to the post office directly for fear they were watching me too. Halfway across I heard footsteps and looked back. Sergeant Buck was coming after me in his familiar double-quick, so I waited. He came to a smart halt, and while he didn’t actually salute, I had the impression of being pretty military myself and rather receiving intelligence in line of battle.
“I attended to that matter of the picture, ma’am,” he said.
I said, “Thank you—so much! Where is it?”
“It got accidentally burned up,” he answered, and spat neatly down into the Truckee.
“That’s too bad,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered with a certain sinister relish. “Irregardless of the fact it wasn’t of her in what you’d call an uncompromising position exactly, it don’t hurt to pin the ears back on those babies.”
Not knowing who the man in the picture was, Sergeant Buck could not possibly know just how uncompromising—in a very literal sense—that picture had been. I wondered for a moment if I should tell him, and thought not.
“I’ll be getting back now, ma’am,” Sergeant Buck said. “And I wouldn’t go traipsing around the streets alone, if I was you. It ain’t safe, and it ain’t ladylike.”
Which in Reno is wrong. A lone woman in the streets and in night clubs and gambling joints is safer, I should think, than she might be alone in her own apartment in New York. Physically safer . . . and the moral danger she runs, in the line of how much she drinks and gambles, is entirely up to her. And the unique conventions of a place where there are so many lone women make it perfectly ladylike for her to go anywhere by herself. It may not be fun, but it’s correct. And ordinarily she doesn’t stay alone more than a moment or two. As I discovered practically immediately.
13
I posted Judy’s letter in the mail box on the corner of Virginia Street. The neon-lighted oasis of the River House reminded me of the sandwich I’d left untouched on the table after my encounter with Mr. Ewing, and I turned along First Street and went in. A crowd of people in varying degrees of Westernalia were dancing to the aching moan of a cowboy orchestra from Hollywood. Half a dozen little groups were seated on high leather-topped stools at the bar. The news of Dex Cromwell’s murder had spread to all the regular customers. Everybody—even the dealers in a little huddle at the end of the deserted row of brightly lighted gambling tables—was discussing it . . . in discreet guarded undertones, so that the dancers, who were mostly transient visitors, neither members of the divorce colony nor the town, weren’t aware that anything out of the ordinary had happened. It is part of the code of Reno to protect its visitors from open gossip and unfavorable publicity. There’s a constant underground struggle that goes on between the people who profit by keeping Reno’s veneer of respectability polished and intact, and the Steve Ewings’s and newspaper gossip writers snooping about for a juicy paragraph for the outside world to read for breakfast and say with the Pharisee, “I am not as other men.”
As I came in someone looked around, and there was a little hush. Frenchy, the proprietor, came forward and greeted me, and Whitey disengaged himself from a little group at the end of the bar and came forward too.
“I’d like something to eat,” I said.
Whitey, oddly enough considering the apparent state he’d been in at the Washoe Bar, was quite sober.
“Can I sit with you?” he asked. If I hadn’t just happened to notice the little sign he gave one of the men at the bar I should have thought nothing but the finest motives of sympathy and friendship motivated him—until I got my bill for his supper that he didn’t eat and his wine that he didn’t drink and a good deal of rye that he did.
“Listen, Whitey,” I said, when I’d ordered. “How long have you known Dex Cromwell?”
His white eyelashes blinked rapidly. I didn’t realize that according to the Reno code I shouldn’t have come right out with such a question at such a time. He wrinkled his sunburned brow.
“Gee, now, Miz’ Latham, let’ see. I guess quite some time,” he said. “First time was in L. A. when I was working in the movies, about ten years ago. Then I come up here when he was getting his divorce, about three years ago.”
“Did you know Mrs. Gorman then too?”
“Sure, I knew Kaye. Kaye’s a real lady.”
“And Vicki—I mean was she here?”
“Jeez, no, Miz’ Latham—Vicki wasn’t here then.”
“But she knew Dex before he came out this time, didn’t she?”
“I don’t think so. But don’t pay no attention to Vicki, Miz’ Latham—she’s nuttier’n a fruit cake.”
At that moment Vicki came in from the other room, behind her Kaye Gorman and Joe Lucas, his two big hands on her shoulders, pushing her inside. He saw me first and gave me a broad good-natured grin. Kaye Gorman, who seemed intensely aware of everything he did, followed his eye quickly. Her baby face tightened, then she smiled politely—as she would have done in the East—and twisted her shoulder to shake Joe’s hands off.
“If that ain’t the payoff!” Whitey muttered angrily. “The son of a buck!”
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Look at that dirty chisellin’ rat!”
He pushed his chair back with a restrained violence and got up, muttering and mumbling. “I’m going to clear out of here, Miz’ Latham. If she wants to be seen playin’ around that . . .”
