Reno Rendezvous, page 12
Colonel Primrose nodded. “And what did you do, Mrs. Bonner?”
“I went out for a drive, out to Truckee, with Joe Lucas. We came back a little after two. I talked to some people in the bar, for about half an hour. Then I went upstairs and stayed there for a while . . . till about half-past two. Then I . . . I went downstairs again. I couldn’t bear being in that room alone, and I didn’t like to bother my aunt. I was going for a drive, but they’d picked my car up. I keep it at a garage in Chestnut Street. I didn’t want to bother them to bring it back.”
I saw Bill Hogan glance at Colonel Primrose, a rather odd expression on his face.
“So I just walked along the river . . . just walked along, that’s all, until about four. I came in and went to sleep. I was dreadfully tired.”
The three men there looked at her. I could see perfectly plainly that none of them believed her. Even without the salvaged note of mine, and Mrs. de Courcey’s report of the quarrel, I doubt if they would have done. It was too transparent, too childish.
Colonel Primrose took out a pack of cigarettes and held it down to her. She shook her head. He lighted one himself.
“How about yesterday afternoon, Mrs. Bonner?”
She looked up, waiting for him to explain.
“You knew your aunt was coming on the afternoon plane, didn’t you?”
Judy nodded. Her face had closed again, as if someone had suddenly put up a pair of invisible shutters and barred them with invisible bars.
“Why didn’t you go to meet her?”
“Because I had something else I had to do. I sent Dex Cromwell, only I didn’t explain she wouldn’t look like an aunt. So he missed her.”
“Or perhaps meeting Mrs. Gorman was the cause of it?”
There was no sign of light, or anger, in her face. It was blank and locked.
“You had something else to do that was important enough to keep you from meeting Mrs. Latham?”
“Yes.”
“What was it, Mrs. Bonner?”
“Nothing, really.”
Mr. Martin’s Bryanic face was very worried.
“It is a fact, isn’t it, that you went to Virginia City, alone?”
“Yes.”
“And bought that candle pick?”
She nodded without looking at it.
“The clerk at the shop, Mrs. Bonner, says you jabbed it in your stomach and said, ‘This would make a grand dagger, wouldn’t it?’ ”
The last vestige of color drained from Judy’s face. Her lips moved, but no sound came from them.
“The clerk said, ‘Yes, many a miner in the old days got one of these between the ribs.’—Do you remember his saying that to you, Mrs. Bonner?”
Martin jumped to his feet. “Don’t answer that, Mrs. Bonner! Just a—”
Judy nodded slowly. “It’s true. I did say that—so did he. But I didn’t mean . . .”
“Who is Charles Baker, Mrs. Bonner?” Colonel Primrose asked abruptly.
If they were trying to catch her, it was a tactical error. She was still too stunned to be stunned any further. She just shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“He tried to call you all day yesterday, Mrs. Bonner,” Bill Hogan said.
“I know. I got the slips they put in my mail box. But I didn’t talk to him. I don’t know anybody of that name.”
Hogan took a paper out of his folder on the desk. “These are fingerprints from his room in the hotel, Mrs. Bonner.—And they match.”
Judy looked up. I could see her clinching her fists to keep from crying out. Her voice was almost completely casual.
“Match—what?” she asked.
“Fingerprints on Dexter Cromwell’s car door,” Colonel Primrose said quietly.
There was no sign of shock or surprise in her face, no sign that she hadn’t already known how it would be.
Colonel Primrose ran his hands through his thick gray hair—which I knew was a sign that he was more than a little puzzled.
Hogan took out another card. “We’ve broadcast this description of him. Well over six feet, broad shouldered, athletic. Between twenty-eight and thirty-two. Wavy chestnut hair, hazel eyes, tanned complexion, slight scar on forehead, wearing gray chalk stripe flannel suit and brown shoes.—He had a seat reserved on the Eastern plane, but he wasn’t on it. Not when it reached Omaha, anyway.”
Judy’s eyes widened.
Colonel Primrose leaned forward and took her hands in his, looking her steadily in the eyes.
“Mrs. Bonner,” he said, very earnestly, “did you, with these two hands, murder Dexter Cromwell?”
“No—she didn’t!”
A hard quiet voice from the door brought every one of us to startled attention. I turned my head, but I’d seen in Judy’s face already a valiant little standard flying, a mixture of all the emotions a woman knows. Before my eyes reached him I knew that the man standing there was well over six feet, with broad shoulders, hazel eyes, suntanned skin, with the scar on his forehead. And I well remembered the Harvard-Princeton game that he’d got that scar in.
I looked back at Judy. She was sitting back in her chair, her eyes closed; and I saw the tears crowding under her long gold-tipped lashes. She hadn’t looked around.
“I heard on the radio you wanted me,” the man said. He came on into the room. “Here I am. My name’s Clem Bonner.”
15
Clem Bonner came calmly in and sat down at the end of the desk opposite Judy. Bill Hogan’s bright blue eyes were fixed intently on him. Colonel Primrose glanced at Judy Bonner, sitting there, staring at the floor, a smile flickering for a brief instant in his sparkling black parrot’s eyes.
“Perhaps, Mr. Bonner,” he said politely, “you’ll be good enough to explain why you registered at the Washoe under a false name?”
Clem tossed his battered gray hat down on the desk. His jaw was set, his eyes sombre and unhappy, his mouth hard. My heart sank. I’d never seen him like this before. I’d known him chiefly as a friendly, grinning, charming young man usually coaching my two youngsters, who simply worship him, in broken field running—I imagine—across my back garden . . . something, certainly, that involved kicking up all the mulch carefully laid down for the winter.
He’d barely nodded to me, and he hadn’t even glanced at Judy. He looked now at Hogan and Colonel Primrose, with steady unflinching eyes.
“So my wife wouldn’t be made the subject of still more gossip,” he said curtly.
The eyes of the two policemen rested on him, unwavering, probing.
“Yeh?” Hogan said. “You could have done that easier by keeping away from Reno. What’d you come out for?”
“I didn’t like the company my wife was keeping. As long as she is my wife, I’m doing what I can to take care of her.”
“You mean Cromwell?”
“Right.”
“You know he’s dead—murdered?”
Clem nodded. “And it’s O. K. as far as I’m concerned.”
There was an instant of rather intense silence in the police headquarters of The Biggest Little City in the World. Clem pulled a battered pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and lighted one, entirely indifferent to the sudden consternation in Judy’s eyes.
Colonel Primrose glanced at me. When he spoke I knew he was being deliberately provocative.
“And you left the hotel, Mr. Bonner . . . knowing your wife would be bound to be involved?”
A kind of sardonic amusement flickered in Clem’s eyes. “You can put it that way.”
Judy’s voice broke in, thrilling with sudden protest.
“But that’s not true! He didn’t know Dex was dead!”
Their eyes met, and held an instant. Clem said curtly, “You keep still.”
The color flamed in Judy’s cheeks, and died. I saw her catch her under lip in her teeth to keep it from trembling visibly.
“How do you explain your fingerprints on the car Cromwell was murdered in, Mr. Bonner?”
I saw Clem’s eyes sharpen, his jaw tighten a little harder, as if this was something he was not prepared for. “I guess that’s for you to figure out,” he said coolly.
Colonel Primrose picked up the wrought iron candle pick on the desk. “Have you seen this, Mr. Bonner?”
A sharp wedge of silence thrust itself suddenly into the room. Judy’s body tensed as if she were steeling herself for a blow.
“I haven’t anything to say,” Clem said abruptly. Colonel Primrose turned the bloodstained candle holder over in his hands as if he was examining it for the first time. Clem’s eyes were fixed on it, and beyond it on Judy’s crumpled and stained riding shirt.
“This is what he was killed with,” Colonel Primrose said casually. I suppose nobody but Sergeant Buck and myself would have known that he was as tense and aware as a pointer motionless in the field. “It was found in Mrs. Bonner’s clothes hamper in her bathroom, wrapped in this shirt of hers.”
He picked the shirt up, deliberately, and wrapped the candle holder again.
The blood surged darkly into Clem’s face. He started to speak, and checked himself. Judy turned in her chair so that she didn’t have to look at him. I had the feeling, as her body relaxed that the small white flame of . . . something, I didn’t know what . . . had died again in her heart just then.
Colonel Primrose put the shirt-wrapped weapon back on the desk.
“Doesn’t get us very far, does it?” he said placidly, and got up. “Well, I think Mrs. Bonner ought to get some rest.”
He looked at Bill Hogan. Hogan pushed back his chair.
“We . . . don’t like to keep a lady in the cells downstairs, Mrs. Bonner,” he said gruffly. “It’s up to you. If you’ll go back to your hotel and stay there, all right. But you’ll understand you’re . . . incommunicado.”
He looked at Clem, and at Mr. Martin. “She’s in your custody, Martin. You can take her back.”
Judy’s face under its sun tan was the color of old ivory. “Thank you, Mr. Hogan!” she said, her low voice like the surface of rubbed velvet.
Clem Bonner got up, his eyes fixed on her for the first time, dumb and aching. I thought for a moment that he couldn’t help crossing the room to her and crushing her in his arms, once and forever. But maybe I was mistaken. “I won’t try to see her, if that’s what you mean.” He spoke so brusquely that her body stiffened involuntarily.
She hesitated as she passed me. “Are you coming, Grace?”
“I’d like Mrs. Latham to stay a minute,” Colonel Primrose said. “You too, Mr. Bonner.”
Judy went quickly out the door. I think I felt a more poignant ache for her just then, going out, chin up, back straight, her gray eyes almost blinded with unshed tears, than I’ve felt since the years I watched my two tiny boys meet their small reverses with the appallingly sturdy fortitude of childhood. A broken train of cars teaches people to take a broken train of dreams, I suppose.
Their steps, hers quick and light, Mr. Martin’s slow and ponderous, died away in the night. Hogan nodded to Colonel Primrose and went out. Colonel Primrose shifted his position on the edge of the desk.
“I want to say something to both of you,” he said calmly. “You might come a little closer, Mrs. Latham.—The amount of evidence that’s piling up against Mrs. Bonner is pretty staggering. But—and it’s against the rules of police procedure for me to tell you this—it’s so damned staggering that both Hogan and the Chief of Police, as well as myself, have about come to the conclusion that it’s too staggering.”
He looked at us for a moment, his face very grave.
“On the other hand, the District Attorney, who’s somewhat of an ass, and hasn’t been in office very long, doesn’t see that. And it’s highly probable, the way things stand at present, that he could make a local jury not see it. Furthermore, he has political ambitions, and a case like this could make a good spring board.”
Clem Bonner’s face was expressionless.
“However, I . . . don’t believe she killed him. In fact, since nine-thirty this evening I’ve been pretty certain she didn’t.”
He looked at me with a polite but sardonic smile, and I stared at him open-mouthed, trying desperately to think what could have happened at nine-thirty. It would have been just about the time I was trying to call Clem in New York from the Washoe bar.
He went on slowly.
“I don’t think she killed Cromwell. There has to be a motive for doing things like that, and a powerful one. Wilstack—the District Attorney—thinks jealousy is enough, in this case. Perhaps. If it is, it won’t be Mrs. Bonner we’re looking for. She didn’t care enough about the fellow to kill him.”
He looked down at Clem Bonner for an instant.
“That brings up two possibilities, one of which is . . . unpleasant. Someone else killed Dexter Cromwell, with a motive that so far we are utterly in the dark about; and he deliberately put the murder off on Mrs. Bonner, perhaps because, in some way, it was just the simplest thing to do . . . or, more probably, because he had a very devilish determination that Judith Bonner was to suffer for it.”
He stood up, his voice harder and more clipped than I’d ever heard it. “There are human emotions that turn into something pretty terrible, when they go sour. Murder is healthy, compared to that. The torture that whoever did this is putting Mrs. Bonner through is . . . not healthy.”
Clem Bonner got up abruptly, and paced back and forth between the desk and the door.
Colonel Primrose watched him silently for a moment. “The point being,” he went on coolly, “that you two have got to help me here. There are questions that must be answered, and quickly.—Assuming that Mrs. Bonner did not herself take that candle pick out of her room and put it back, stained with Cromwell’s blood, in her clothes hamper, there is no problem about how that was done. Anybody could have got in her room quite easily by means of the corridor window and the fire escape. But who? And was Mrs. Bonner out at the race track with Cromwell when he was killed? And above all . . . why was he killed?”
I looked at him stupidly, not understanding . . . for the only thing we really knew, Colonel Primrose and I, was that whatever else Judy Bonner had done or had not done, she had been there in the car when he had died. Those golden hairs clutched in his hand were silent and damning testimony to that.
He went calmly on. “And what about Mr. Bonner’s fingerprints on the door of that car? Was he at the race track too?”
Clem Bonner, still pacing back and forth, halted abruptly.
“No,” he said. “He wasn’t. And Judy wasn’t either.”
Colonel Primrose nodded politely.
“Sure of that, Bonner?”
“Quite.”
“Then you were with her after you saw Cromwell?”
My heart sank as Clem flushed darkly again.
Colonel Primrose shifted his weight on the desk. “Why did you come out here, by the way?”
“I’ve told you.”
“You’ve told me part.”
Clem turned angrily, or so I thought at first. I saw then that it wasn’t anger as much as it was pain and resentment, struggling with new bitterness, and new doubt. He looked at Colonel Primrose for a long instant, coolly, steadily appraising, before he answered.
“All right. Here’s the rest of it. When my wife decided to come out here, I told her I’d give her a power of attorney so she could get her divorce, uncontested and decently, and marry Cromwell—if she wanted to, and that’s what she did want—just as long as he didn’t come out here with her. I told her that, and I told him too. I found out, three days ago, that he did come out with her . . . and I came out to break his God damned neck. That’s why I came out.”
I started violently at a deep voice that spoke suddenly from the door behind me: “Is this a confession, Bonner?”
I turned in my chair and stared aghast at the little man standing there behind me. He wore a bright brown suit, and he had a bald narrow domelike head and glittering black eyes as sharp and beady as shoe buttons, and a large rigid mouth in a thin saffron-colored face.
“Is this a confession?” he repeated harshly.
“This is Mr. Wilstack,” Colonel Primrose said suavely. “The District Attorney.—Mrs. Latham, and Mr. Bonner.”
The District Attorney’s little beady eyes were boring into Clem’s face. And Clem, startled for the moment, stared angrily at him. “You can take it for one, if you like,” he said curtly.
“Since your fingerprints are all over the door of the death car . . .” Wilstack began. He hesitated, a shadow of calculated indecision on his shrewd little face as he darted a glance at Colonel Primrose. “Come in here,” he said abruptly. “I want to talk to you.”
He held the door open. Clem gave me a quick sardonic grin and strode through.
I picked up my bag. Colonel Primrose was standing by the door leading to the corridor.
“I would never have believed,” I said bitterly, “that you could have let anybody down like that.”
I was terribly angry, at his doing that to Clem, and hurt too, I suppose.
He stared at me for a moment, puzzled, and then incredulous. Then he blocked the door, his hand on the knob, an expression of hurt bitterness gathering on his own face.
“You’re at liberty to believe anything you choose, my dear,” he said. “I’m only trying to save your niece. And if I do, it will be in spite of a large and varied multitude of perfectly demented things that you’ve done, Mrs. Latham . . . and if I fail, it will be because I can’t untie the noose you’ve already tied around her neck.”
I stared at him, blank-faced and utterly speechless.
“And inasmuch as I’m only doing this for you—”
He stopped abruptly. “Good night.”
I hurried out and through the still brilliantly lighted empty streets . . . hurt, and bewildered, and unhappy, and more afraid, in spite of what he’d said before, than I’d ever been in my life.
