Reno Rendezvous, page 16
“Has anyone said she did, Mrs. Gorman?”
She raised her eyes to his, round and blue as delft saucers.
“I don’t mean they’ve actually been accusing her. But you know how there’s always a lot of talk around the bars.”
Clem Bonner, standing there by the window, moved suddenly again. In the glare of the lights that Hogan’s men had brought in I could see his face flushing. I wondered what he was thinking, and whether what he had told me, about himself and Kaye Gorman, was true . . . not doubting it, exactly, even in face of Judy’s seeing her go into his room, but wondering, nevertheless.
And I looked at Kaye Gorman, wondering if what Colonel Primrose obviously had in mind—that Vicki had been attacked by mistake, the murderer thinking from the black lace dress that she was Kaye—made any sense. Kaye Gorman did not look like my idea of a femme fatale. Vicki had been more like it, some way, with that slow and secret smile of hers.
21
Colonel Primrose’s black eyes rested on Kaye Gorman’s blue eyes with a kind of placid but steady wariness.
“I see,” he said. “By the way, Mrs. Gorman, didn’t you tell Mr. Hogan here that you went to bed early—around one-thirty o’clock—Monday night, when Cromwell was killed?”
“Yes. I told him that. I did go to bed early. I don’t know whether it was one or not, but it wasn’t two. Dex brought me home from here. I was a little vague about time. You know how it is after you’ve met a lot of old friends and had a drink with each of them.”
There was no change in her hard voice, but she smiled a little.
Colonel Primrose did not smile. “You weren’t present, then, when Mr. Bonner here had his little set-to with Cromwell?”
A sharp note came into her voice instantly.
“No—I wasn’t! Does anybody say I was?”
She looked angrily at Clem.
“I didn’t say you were,” Clem said quietly.
She laughed her short laugh.
“Well, I hope not! I mean, after all—we were friends, once . . .”
Clem said nothing.
“All right, Mrs. Gorman,” Colonel Primrose said. “And by the way, Bonner,” he went on after she’d gone out, “when did you see Miss Ray last?”
“I saw her take that rope,” Clem said quietly. “As Mrs. Gorman did. Furthermore, I saw her go into the powder room . . . with the rope in her hand.”
Colonel Primrose nodded, looking steadily at him. “I wondered if she didn’t,” he said. “You’re sure of that?”
Clem nodded.
“She’d been talking to a fellow who was showing her how to handle it.”
“When was that?”
Clem hesitated, and turned to me. “It was before Polly finished her dinner, Grace. I mean, she was still at your table.”
He grinned suddenly, without much mirth.
“I was sitting there, thinking I wished she’d quit looking so damned much like she was looking through the gates of Heaven, or something . . . and thinking that’s the way Judy used to look, before . . . oh, well.”
Colonel Primrose looked at me with a faint smile in his eyes.
“You didn’t go out of the room yourself?”
“Yes, I did. I went out to look at Frenchy’s wine cellar and the new kitchens.”
“After you saw Vicki go in the powder room with the rope?” Hogan asked sharply.
“Yes. Just after. The little fellow they call Whitey asked me if I didn’t want to see them. He said ‘We got great pride in this joint.’ That’s why I went. I didn’t want to see the damn things.”
“Whitey was with you all the time you were out?”
“Yes.—Well, no. Not exactly. I mean, I was talking to the chef. He used to work at Mori’s on 56th Street. We had a drink out there, just the two of us. Whitey wasn’t there then. We went out together, and he was next to me at the bar when Mrs. Latham screamed.”
“He could possibly have had time to come in this room?”
Clem nodded slowly. “I think so. I’m not saying he did, or even that I saw him leave. He just wasn’t there in the kitchen when the chef and I had that drink.”
“And about Monday night, Mr. Bonner,” Colonel Primrose said placidly. “You told Mr. Wilstack you got off the night plane, registered, under an assumed name, at the Washoe, and didn’t leave your room until you went to Mrs. Bonner’s room.—Do you want to amend that?”
“No.”
“Then when was it you saw Cromwell?”
Clem grinned down at me—still not mirthfully.
“I didn’t say I saw him.”
“You did see him, however.”
“How do you know?”
“Your fingerprints are on his car—gripping the left door, by the wheel, with both hands. It also has certain streaks just by them that apparently show your hands being jerked off—as if the car was started suddenly while you were still hanging on.—That’s correct, isn’t it?”
Clem’s voice was hard and wary. “What if it is?”
I could see that Colonel Primrose was counting ten, or something, just as I’d done so many times with Judy.
“It bears on what happened—about your wife, Bonner—the night Cromwell was killed.—Did you take that candle pick from her table during your argument with her? Had somebody already got it? Did somebody come in later and get it? Did nobody get it at all—was it used by Judith Bonner and no one else? What you did bears on all those things.—You see, Bonner, the general idea is that somebody went out to the race track with Cromwell . . . or followed him out there because someone else was already in the car with him . . .”
Clem shook his head curtly.
“If you mean I followed him out there because my wife was in the car with him, you’re dead wrong.”
“She wasn’t in the car?”
“She wasn’t.”
“Who was in the car?”
“Cromwell—nobody else.”
“Is that a fact, Bonner?”
“Yes.”
They looked at each other steadily a long moment. I knew, and therefore Colonel Primrose must have known, that Clem was not telling the truth. A curious light flickered in Colonel Primrose’s eyes, as if he was hearing something that was terribly important.
“Did your meeting with Cromwell come before, or after, your session with your wife?”
“Before,” Clem said quietly.
“I suppose there’s no point in asking what you talked about?”
“Right. It’s . . . obvious.”
“Or what you and Miss Ray talked about this afternoon?—I’m told she visited you around one o’clock. Correct?”
“Right.”
“How long have you known Miss Ray?”
“Since around one o’clock,” Clem said coolly.
One of Bill Hogan’s men came in and handed Hogan a list of names. “That’s the lot,” he said. “Everybody that was here.”
Hogan passed the list to Colonel Primrose, who checked several names on it and handed it back. “Clear everybody else out,” he said. He looked at me. “You might take Mrs. Bonner back to the hotel. And I’d like to see her in the morning.”
I didn’t see who stayed, in the mad scramble of nearly everybody to get out of the River House. Judy and Polly Wagner were already near the door, talking to the white-haired old man who came in to play the piano for an hour each evening for his food. And anyway I was so relieved that we were let off for once that my curiosity was momentarily in abeyance. We hurried along to Virginia Street and across the bridge.
A crowd of girls from Polly’s ranch were waiting for her in the cocktail lounge. She joined them, Judy and I stopped at the desk for her key.
“You’ve got both keys out, Mrs. Bonner,” the night clerk said, turning from the empty pigeon hole under her room number. “Here’s Mrs. Latham’s key.”
We went up and through my room to Judy’s sitting room. Her key was on the table. She picked it up and looked at it for a moment. Then she turned to me, a puzzled look in her serious gray eyes.
“Grace—didn’t I give my other key to Dex, Monday night, to come up and get my jacket?”
I nodded . . . the thought never entering my tired and numbed mind of how terribly important that could be.
She walked over to the window and drew the curtains together. She turned back slowly.
“You know, Grace, I keep telling myself I must be developing a persecution complex,” she said, with an attempt at a smile.
“Why, darling?” I said.
“Because the more I think of it, the less I can help think somebody’s really trying to make the police think I killed Dex.”
“It was bound to dawn on you sooner or later, darling,” I said. “Everybody else has had that unpleasant idea for a long time now.”
She looked at me with gray bewildered eyes, her oval face under her golden hair a pale inscrutable mask that belied her next remark.
“I’m beginning to be absolutely terrified. Mr. Martin went over all the evidence against me this morning.—I suddenly had the wild idea that maybe I did do it. And now . . . Vicki. Wait till they find out that Joe Lucas has taught me a lot of parlor tricks with a lariat.”
She stopped abruptly, and went, as if she had just remembered something, to the desk there. She opened the drawer and riffled through the note paper, her hands a little unsteady.
“I burned the sample letter, darling,” I said.
She drew a deep breath.
“That’s a break,” she said coolly.
“—Unless you finished a copy including all its worst features, and it’s still floating around.”
She nodded, and gave me a quick little smile.
“I did. That’s what I went up to Tahoe for the other night. Not that it matters.”
She came and sat down by me. “It wouldn’t matter, anyway, except that I shouldn’t have mentioned anybody’s name. That was stupid. But I . . . I just didn’t like the way Dex was playing up to Mrs. de Courcey. It wasn’t because I was jealous—I already knew I’d never marry him, after I’d got my . . . divorce. You see, she’s got a pretty big settlement from General de Courcey, and both Whitey and this Ewing were trying to get money out of her. And I almost begin to think Dex was too. I guess that’s a foul thing to say, but I think he was.”
“Don’t you think,” I remarked dryly, “that Mrs. de Courcey is quite old enough to take care of herself?”
She shook her head.
“Anywhere else, maybe. Not out here. Everything’s so plausible and . . . and open, in Reno, that it’s terribly hard to see it’s all just part of an enormous build-up to get your money.—I loaned Whitey a hundred and fifty dollars to pay his mother’s hospital bill, and Dex made him give it back to me—his mother’s been dead fifteen years.”
She smiled. I couldn’t help thinking about Dex’s mother. It had worked the other way, in her case.
“What about Vicki?” I asked. “Did she collect money from people too?”
Judy shrugged.
“Mrs. de Courcey probably gave her some. I know she gave her clothes. But only because she was really fond of her.”
I heard the door across the hall open and close, and almost immediately open and close again. There was a knock at Judy’s door, and Mrs. de Courcey came in as soon as we’d got it unlocked.
22
“My dears, I’m worn out!” she said. “I can’t bear to stay in there by myself. May I come in?”
“Of course,” Judy said.
Mrs. de Courcey lighted a cigarette. She was nervous and jumpy and kept taking out her vanity and putting rouge on her cheeks, as if she saw a pallor there that no one else could see.
“I suppose you were talking about Vicki—it’s too awful.”
She turned abruptly to Judy.
“Were you here this afternoon about two?”
Judy glanced at me. “Around then. Why?”
“I was just wondering,” Mrs. de Courcey said. “Wondering if anyone might have overheard a talk she and I were having. It didn’t make sense to me, but if anybody had heard it who could make sense out of it, then all this might be a little more understandable.”
I stared quite openly at her merry, handsome, commanding face under that marvellous henna hair, wondering myself if what she was now telling us made any sense.
She hesitated a moment. Then she said, quite abandoning her mannered garrulity for the second time since I’d known her, “It was that idea of being overheard that made me think of those little doors where you set the garbage tins in. They’re quite big enough for anybody to open and listen through—easily.”
I still stared, wondering if she was only trying to find out if she and Vicki Ray had been overheard, or was trying to say something and finding it difficult to say.
“In fact, if you’re small enough you can even get through them.—I couldn’t, of course, but Whitey did, one afternoon when I left my keys inside.”
She looked intently, and rather oddly, at Judy.
“In fact, my dear, I’ve been wondering if somebody got into your apartment that way, and put that candle holder arrangement in your hamper, to make it look as if . . .”
She waved her cigarette to indicate the rest of her meaning.
“I’m awfully interested in all this, of course—apart from you, I mean, Judy . . . and it’s perfectly absurd of them to think for a minute that you did it.—You won’t believe me, but they’ve had the police asking questions about me. The General’s in a stew—he’s afraid if I get involved in a scandal I won’t get a divorce.”
There was something very startling in the complete disillusionment in her voice. I looked at her in surprise. The manner had completely disappeared. She’d slumped against the cushions, all the crisp merriment in her eyes gone. She was suddenly nothing but a tired old woman, whose mask of gaiety and bright sophistication had dropped and broken at our feet.
“My husband’s retiring next month,” she said abruptly. “He’s wanted to marry . . . somebody for five years. But he couldn’t, not while he was in the Service. We had to keep face, so we went on. It’s funny . . . to find yourself not needed any more—even for appearances.”
She got up, went over to the cocktail bar and poured herself a Scotch and soda mechanically, not, I’m sure, even aware that she wasn’t in her own apartment.
“I think that’s why so many of us who come out here go so completely berserk, and take up with people we’d never know existed, if it weren’t for the movies. The most extraordinary things seem normal here. I’ve loaned people money I know I’ll never see again, on hard luck stories that wouldn’t have deceived a babe in New York.”
She drained her glass. Judy and I watched her move aimlessly around the room. I still have no idea whether she was on the point of saying something else. There was something on her mind, obviously.
She stopped at the windows and drew the curtains apart.
“I never think what a cesspool Reno is, until I look up at the sky at night,” she said abruptly. “Then people like Frenchy, and Whitey . . .”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“All of them . . . scrabbling around, sly and tricky, selling a three-dollar dinner for a dollar and a half as a come-on for their crooked gambling tables. Definitely like something you’d find under a board in a cellar. If it weren’t for the nights, serene and star-studded, I couldn’t stick it.”
She stepped out onto the balcony. Neither Judy nor I said anything. After a moment I saw her glance to the right, and stiffen perceptibly. She came back into the room.
“That’s odd,” she said. “I understood Mr. Ewing was too . . . too ill to be out. I understand from Whitey, by the way, that he’s not getting a divorce at all. He’s an artist, of some kind.”
Judy glanced at me, her deep fringed gray eyes lighting in the first sudden spontaneous and mirthful smile I’d seen in them since I came to Reno.
“I suppose,” Mrs. de Courcey said, “that’s why he doesn’t seem popular with the men. Though Dex liked him. He was the only one who seemed to. You remember, Judy, he was up at his place at Tahoe quite frequently, you’ve probably seen him there.”
A tiny surprised question darted through Judy’s eyes.
“I wasn’t ever up there but once, in the morning for a minute, to pick Dex up when his car was in the garage.”
“He used to come with Vicki and Joe Lucas, in Joe’s car,” Mrs. de Courcey said. “He must have money. He certainly dressed well, and I certainly saw him lose six hundred dollars downstairs one night.”
She flicked her cigarette into the empty fireplace.
“Well, I’d better let you people go to bed. You both look completely fagged. Good night.”
She closed the door behind her.
I felt she wasn’t thinking about either of us then, actually, and I was sure of it when I didn’t hear her door open and close . . . not for some time after I’d gone to bed. I lay there, quite sleepless, thinking about Vicki Ray . . . wondering grotesquely if she had greeted the dark ferryman with her same breezy salute and her slow secret smile as she stepped into his grim stone boat to cross the river of Death.
That sentence spoken in the River House—“Whatever they say about her, and it’s plenty, and it’s all true, she was one of the most amusing, and generous, and kindhearted people”—came into my mind again as I heard Mrs. de Courcey’s key in her door, and the door closing very quietly. I wondered again who had told Mrs. de Courcey that Dexter Cromwell was dead, that night, before she came into Judy’s apartment.
23
I’ve wondered a number of times what actual difference it might have made in what happened later if I hadn’t been standing at the desk reading my mail when Clem Bonner stepped out of the elevator the next morning, or even if the desk clerk hadn’t said, at precisely the moment he was heading toward the door, “Mrs. Bonner’s car has come, Mrs. Latham.”
He stopped, crossed the lobby and came over to me.
“Hello,” he said. “Where are you going?”
