Reno Rendezvous, page 13
Whitey and Kaye Gorman were at the hotel desk playing blackjack with the night clerk. They looked up as I came in, and Kaye came over to where I was standing by the elevator.
“Is it true Clem’s back?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Where is he?”
“In jail, I imagine,” I said. “He seemed to be heading that way.”
“Are you being funny, Mrs. Latham?”
Her voice was hard, and irritated.
“I wish I could be,” I said shortly. “Good night.”
16
I don’t know how late I should have slept the next morning if I hadn’t been waked by something touching me. I opened my eyes to see Judy sitting cross-legged on the foot of my bed.
Her wide-set gray eyes met mine gravely. “—What happened to Clem?”
I sat up.
“I don’t know. He told Colonel Primrose he came out to break Dex’s neck, and the District Attorney overheard him.”
She twisted her handkerchief into a tight string and let it unroll.
“Judy,” I said. “I don’t want to pry into your affairs, but I would like to know why you allowed Dex Cromwell to come out here with you, when you’d agreed not to? It doesn’t sound like you, some way.”
The color rose slowly in her cheeks.
“He didn’t come with me. I didn’t know he was coming. He was here when I got here—he drove out before I left, and met me at the train.”
Her long gold-tipped lashes brushing her cheeks covered her darkening downcast eyes.
“I told him he couldn’t stay. He said he’d only come out to see I was all right. And I was miserably lonesome. I . . . I guess any sort of excuse was good enough. He wasn’t staying in Reno. He was up at Lake Tahoe, on the California side.”
She got up.
“He kept saying he’d leave the next day. . . . But it was just as much my fault as his, and I didn’t care if Clem did know about it. I thought it wouldn’t hurt him to know somebody thought I was just as attractive as . . . as Kaye. Only . . . nobody did.”
I looked at her, standing in the windows, young and almost unbearably lovely, the sun making her hair a nimbus of molten gold.
“I know it sounds stupid and petty now, Grace! But I didn’t think Clem really cared . . . that he actually meant he wouldn’t let me come out if Dex came. We’d said so many dreadfully cruel things to each other . . . and then, suddenly, it was just all too late. I’d . . . I’d want to say I didn’t care if he saw Kaye, just so he’d let me . . . see him too. And then I’d see him, and I’d say something dreadful I didn’t mean at all, just because I loved him so much. . . . It sounds crazy, but—”
“But unfortunately true,” I said. “It’s what most people do.—What happened here, the other night?”
“Oh, just more of the same,” she said unhappily. “He tried to tell me he didn’t know Kaye was out here. But Dex had seen them together—coming out of his room. They’re both on the next floor.”
“And . . . after that, Judy?” I asked quietly. I hadn’t asked her before—I hadn’t even wanted to ask her, point-blank—if she couldn’t tell me what had happened that night. I knew now that I hadn’t dared . . . not from the moment I’d taken those two hairs from Dexter Cromwell’s dead rigid fingers. And she didn’t answer me now, for the phone in her apartment rang just as I’d spoken. She came back in a minute.
“It’s a girl I knew at school,” she said. “She’s at a boarding house in Mill Street. I was supposed to go to court with her to-day. I . . . I said I’d see if you’d go with her instead.—Would you, Grace? She’s had a rotten time of it, on account of the baby. She’s rather upset.”
She looked at me beseechingly.
“When do I go?” I asked.
“It’s set for ten.”
I’ve wondered since, many times, whether it would have made any difference in what happened afterwards if I’d told Judy—as I felt so much like doing—that my coming to Reno had been on her behalf alone, and that I really didn’t have the strength to take on her friends too. If I’d done that—for one thing—I wouldn’t have met Mr. Tucker, and I wouldn’t have seen Vicki Ray headed down the corridor toward the District Attorney’s office.
I got dressed and met the girl. It seems strange, now, but I don’t even remember her name. She was sweet and rather wan and not far from tears.
“I haven’t really known till this morning if my husband was going to let me have his power of attorney,” she said. “If I didn’t get it, I’d have to stay a month longer, and I’ve got a job waiting for me in Los Angeles—my things are at the bus station already.”
A gray nondescript little man, quite elderly, with white mustaches yellow at the ends and comparatively no teeth, followed us through the marble portico of the court house and up a broad staircase to the left. A brash young man, the girl’s lawyer, met us on the second floor.
“Now then,” he said briskly. “You’ve got your witness? Oh yes—hello, Mr. Tucker.”
The little man with the yellow mustaches nodded. The girl and her lawyer went into consultation by the double doors of the court room. I waited patiently, glancing up at the thin black-and-gold hand across the corridor pointing a scrawny finger above a label “District Attorney’s Office.” Then I looked back at Mr. Tucker, wondering what Daumier would have done with this scene, and stared.
He was nervously motioning someone back down the stairs. I looked past him and saw that oddly enough it was Vicki Ray down there. She’d stopped half way up, her big white hat tilted back on her black curly head, her blue eyes narrowed, the most curious smile on her red lips.
Mr. Tucker wiped the perspiration off his forehead and tugged at his soft Sunday collar as if it was strangling him. Vicki stood there a moment, came jauntily up the stairs, passed Mr. Tucker without a word, glanced at the pointing black-and-gold finger, and went on down the corridor. Half way down it she turned and smiled at Mr. Tucker, and saw me. She stopped short, and then, with her customary debonair salute from the brim of the big white stetson, she came back.
“Hello,” she said. “How’s Mrs. Bonner?”
“She’s fine,” I said. “How are you?”
I spoke with an ease that I was far from feeling, for I was greatly puzzled by all this. It’s strange, I suppose, considering how extraordinary a bearing it was to have on everything, that I wasn’t still more puzzled, and even upset.
“First-rate, thanks.” She cracked her black boot with her crop. “What’s this I hear about Mr. Bonner being here all the time?”
“That’s all I know about it,” I said.
“I mean, is it true?”
I nodded.
“Is he here now?”
“Yes.”
She glanced down the corridor and bit her full lower lip meditatively. “—Where could I see him?”
“My guess would be the city jail,” I said.
She pushed her hat back and smiled. Then she gave Mr. Tucker, still standing there by the railing, a side-long glance.
“This is my landlord,” she said suddenly. She waved him over with an imperative gesture. “Mr. Tucker, where was I night before last from one-thirty on?”
If Vicki Ray had been a slightly intoxicated but good-humored tigress, and Mr. Tucker a rabbit pinned to the ground with one playful paw, he could not have been more unhappy.
“You were at the house, Miss Ray,” he stammered wretchedly.
She raised an airy hand to me. “You see?”
“Why do you keep on telling me this?” I asked sharply. “I’m beginning not to believe it.”
She smiled that odd smile of hers and looked meditatively at Mr. Tucker again.
Some people came out of the court room—a girl with a sheaf of gardenias on her shoulder, and a crowd of other girls laughing and cheering and clapping a young man on the shoulder.
“Come on down to the wedding, Vicki!” somebody shouted.
She gave them her breezy salute and turned back to me. “I’ll be seeing you!” she said. I started to say something, and stopped cold . . . for as our eyes met I saw something behind her long black lashes that I had not thought could be there. It was fear—as plain, naked, ugly fear as I’ve ever seen in my life.
We stood there, staring silently at each other, for just that instant. The girl’s lawyer said, “We’re going in now,” and I followed them to the judge’s chamber. At the door I looked back. Vicki was going down the stairs, her boots clattering on the marble. I glanced at Mr. Tucker. His hands on his panama hat were shaking.
I don’t remember much of that divorce trial. I listened to the girl I’d come with swear that she had lived in Reno since some date six weeks before, and that she expected and intended to reside in Nevada permanently. It seemed a trifle odd, in view of the fact that she had her bus ticket in her bag and her things at the station and a job waiting for her in Los Angeles, but everybody, including her husband’s lawyer and the judge, was not only polite but solemn about it. Mr. Tucker swore to the fact that she had lived six weeks consecutively in Reno; he had seen her at least once in every twenty-four hours of that period. The grounds for divorce were simple too. Her husband stayed away nights. Once when he came home she had asked him where he had been, and he had told her it was none of her business. Her health had suffered under such extreme cruelty.
It was all over in eleven minutes by my wrist watch, and we went out and downstairs. Vicki was gone. I was still wondering about her, in a helplessly bewildered and even slightly frightened way—I couldn’t get that look in her eyes out of my mind. I shook hands with the girl, who said, “Thank you for coming with me, I was afraid he might be there—tell Judy good-bye,” and watched her get into a taxi and head for Los Angeles.
The crowd I’d seen come out of the court room burst out of the Riverside Bar with a great deal of laughing and cheering and throwing of rice and old shoes. How those two young people had got married, and everybody half lit, in so short a time, I couldn’t say, but they had.
I crossed the sun-drenched street and went into the Washoe. Sergeant Buck was in the lobby, and just in the act of scooping an enormous number of half-dollars out of the bottom of one of the slot machines. He gave me a bitter glance out of that mahogany face. “The Colonel wants to see you, ma’am,” he said. “He’s in 321.”
I started for the elevator and stopped, hearing my name spoken. It was Cowboy Joe, coming from the bar, a friendly grin on his bronzed face.
“You seen Vicki this mo’nin’, Miz’ Latham?”
“Yes,” I said. “I just saw her, at the court house.”
His grin widened. “Don’ tell me she’s gettin’ anoth’ divo’ce?”
“I couldn’t say,” I said.
A second voice broke in behind me. “Who’s gettin’ another divorce?”
It was my friend Whitey, with his pale eyes and almost albino hair. He still had on the same tan jodhpurs and salt-sack polo shirt he’d worn at the airport when I came, and in fact I never did see him in anything else, at any hour of the day or night, through all my Reno visit.
“Unless she’s gettin’ married,” Joe Lucas drawled. “Ain’ nothin’ else Vicki’d be doin’ at the co’t house.”
That scrawny black-and-gold finger pointing to the District Attorney’s Office flashed into my mind just as Whitey snapped his fingers with a sharp whistle. “Hey, maybe she was payin’ a call on old Button Eyes, which got her divorce free on account she was cleaned out playin’ blackjack the first week she got here!”
I was abruptly aware that the figures moving in front of me in one of the Washoe’s mirrored pillars had stopped moving. For an instant it was almost as if I had in front of me a stilled kaleidoscopic picture of my own mind . . . as it had gone from person to person connected with Dexter Cromwell, trying, desperately, to find one—not my niece or her husband—who was his murderer. For coincidence—perhaps—had brought together here everybody . . . every person who could possibly have had any reason to thrust that miner’s candle pick into Dexter Cromwell’s throat . . . and was holding them all, for an instant, motionless in the mirrored pillar.
Whitey and Joe Lucas and myself were closest to it. Beyond us, at the door of the bar, Eddie, the old-young waiter, stood, his eyes riveted, for some reason, on Whitey. The door of the elevator had opened at just that moment, and Mrs. de Courcey stood in it with her brace of dachshunds. Kaye Gorman was at the desk, her mail in her hands, her head turned, listening. Coming out of the phone booth beyond the desk, a fat special delivery airmail letter in her hand, her cheeks flushed, eyes shining, was Polly Wagner, in blue jeans and white shirt. Beyond Kaye, at the door, stood Mr. Tucker; and through the revolving door at just that moment, her own debonair self, came Vicki Ray.
And above all of it I could see the hard-bitten granite face of Sergeant Buck by the slot machines, his fishy gray eyes fixed sleepily on one of the men by my side.
I couldn’t explain how, for that instant, all those people stayed motionless, as if they were electric robots, and then looked, each of them, as if still under some remote control, at the girl in the door.
She came on in, her head up, her broad white hat tilted back, smiling that oddly veiled and enchanting smile, strode airily through the lobby, raising her hand in her unique breezy gesture, and stepped into the elevator as Mrs. de Courcey stepped out. If the Mona Lisa hanging on her Louvre wall should wink at the crowd of trippers clustered in front of her, it would come nearer to Vicki’s farewell salute to all of us in the lobby than anything I know.
17
Mrs. de Courcey’s dachshunds broke the tension, straining at their leash and yapping like a pair of animated little sausages. Their mistress was in proper riding clothes, and looked as if she hadn’t slept for weeks. But so, I thought, catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror, did I, and so did all of us.
“What about comin’ out to th’ ranch fo’ a ride this evenin’, Miz’ Latham,” Cowboy Joe drawled lazily. “Ah’ve got English saddles, if you don’ like West’n.”
“I’ll see,” I said.
He crossed the lobby to the desk, Whitey at his heels, and they went out with Kaye Gorman, Sergeant Buck eyeing them with a sort of fishy distaste . . . though Heaven knows he was at least infinitely gaudier than they were, in his bright orange shirt and jewelled boots. He put a half-dollar in the slot and pulled the lever. I heard the clatter of silver in the trough, and Polly Wagner’s gay young voice:
“Sergeant . . . you’re marvellous! I bet you’ve got a system!”
Sergeant Buck—and never would I have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, and maybe the mirror I was seeing him in was distorted, the way they are in Palaces of Fun—flushed a vivid brick-red, and grinned like a very hard-bitten but sheepish schoolboy. Not all women, I was pleased to see, were his natural enemies . . . only me, and of course anyone else obviously laboring to ensnare the Colonel.
But that was not the oddest thing that happened just then. Sergeant Buck took one fishy glance around the lobby, burrowed suddenly into his gaudy Western integuments, pulled out something that looked to me very much like a letter, and slipped it into Polly Wagner’s hand. And she, with only a quick glimmer of surprised relief, thrust it into the pocket of her levi’s without a word, and sauntered over toward me in front of the elevator. Sergeant Buck, his frozen visage quite normal again, moved on in his iron way to the next slot machine.
Polly took hold of my arm and gave it a little squeeze, smiling up at me with her rather shy friendly eyes.
“Is Judy in her room?”
“I suppose so,” I said. “If you can get in, tell her I’ll be along after a bit, will you?”
We got out on the third floor. I went along to 321 and knocked. Colonel Primrose opened the door and said “Come in”—I thought rather shortly. He drew up a chair in front of the sofa.
“Hogan’s got some information over the teletype I thought you’d be interested in,” he said. “Cromwell’s father is a banker in the sense that he’s doorman at the Commonwealth Corn Exchange Bank in Milwaukee. His mother—you recall he told Judy he adored her and she died when he was sixteen, throwing him on his own because he couldn’t get along with his despotic male parent—is alive and runs a rooming house. Cromwell went to high school and had one year on a football scholarship at a college near Milwaukee. His first wife was a widow with some money. He went through most of it and got a Reno divorce three years ago—by default. That means it’s not recognized in most states. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is that Cromwell was a smooth customer on the make, with a good many people hating him like poison, probably.—From the woman he married and rooked out of her investments—”
“Colonel Primrose!” I said. “You’re not going to tell me that Cromwell’s first wife has turned up, and she’s a chambermaid in this hotel, and that—”
He chuckled.
“The nearest we’ve come to that is a girl who works in a beauty shop in Sierra Street who spent a lot of time, apparently, at a cottage he had at Tahoe, on the California side. He stayed there after he got his divorce.”
I don’t know why that reminded me of something.
“Have you seen Vicki?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Why?”
“She’s got something on her mind.”
He smiled dryly.
“We’d find it hard to get off, probably. That young woman has an amazing lot of pretty intimate friends—including the District Attorney. She also has a water-tight alibi for the night of Cromwell’s murder . . . in spite of the fact that Buck saw her at four in the morning playing faro at a Chinese joint in Peavine Street.”
I looked at him blankly.
“Don’t let Vicki’s breezy charm fool you, Mrs. Latham,” he said, with a half smile.
He got up and went to the window, and looked out for a minute. Then he turned back. “They’re holding the inquest this morning. It won’t amount to much. I assumed you’d like to keep out of it, so I’m acting as witness.”
