Reno Rendezvous, page 17
“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “I just thought I’d drive out in the great open spaces and take a look at the desert.”
He hesitated. “Do you think Judy would mind if you drove me up to Lake Tahoe?”
“What for?” I asked.
“Nothing. I’ve just got to go, that’s all.”
That’s how I went. He took the wheel, and grinned suddenly. “She won’t let me drive her car, at home.”
“Men ruin cars,” I said. “That’s one of the things every woman knows.”
I glanced at him there, hatless in the sun. He’d aged during this, I thought. Not that his hair had turned white, but his face was firmer, and harder, his eyes sombre, with a deep aching hunger in them that he couldn’t hide. He looked more as if he knew better now what it was he wanted, and would be a little hard to stop when he decided to get it.
We went out Virginia Street, past the road to the airport where I’d come in Monday evening, leaving behind us the hot dog and doughnut and fruit stands and the tourist camps, past the lovely big cottonwood tree on the left before the road turns off for Virginia City, and turned right near the hot springs into the mountain road. The sun burned on the yellow sage and the gray sand and the paper-white blooms of the desert primrose lining the road, and the purple lupin spreading its small bright carpet here and there. Ring-necked squirrels as gray-dun as the sand scampered across in front of us, and above us loomed Mount Rose, still capped with winter snow.
The road was very steep after we left the flat hot desert and began climbing—pitted from frost and covered with gravel washed down the banks with the melting snows. Very suddenly we came out of the few scrubby aspens and pines, and rounded a sharp curve from which the universe seemed to fall abruptly away, leaving us looking far down on the Washoe meadows, lying sun-bathed between the two dun-colored ridges, tiny and domestic and far away. We were looking out on chasms of rock . . . edges drear and naked shingles of the world.
The car skidded crazily in the gravel. I grabbed the door. Clem grinned, and I tried to, but my hands were quite cold with sudden fright. Looking back on it now, I have a quite irrational notion that that was nothing more or less than some kind of a foreshadowing . . . of what that steep narrow winding road was to mean, of the horror that it was to hold for all of us.
He threw the car into second and kept close to the bank except where the rocks were in the way. I fastened my eyes on the road, trying not to look at the vast fortresses of stone far under us. We reached the plateau finally, where great patches of snow lay among the flower-carpeted knolls, and it was cold in spite of the burning sun, and the air was like sparkling burgundy, rich and tangy; and suddenly we saw the ribbon of cobalt below us through the trees, where Lake Tahoe lay, bluer than the Mediterranean. We began to go down, in second again till we came to the last stretch before the road that runs around the lake.
Clem hadn’t spoken since we’d left the road through the Washoe meadows. As we turned right along the lake he said, “I had a talk with Judy last night, after you went to bed.”
I waited.
“Maybe she wasn’t as goofy about Cromwell as I thought,” he went on, after some time.
“She’s . . . still going on with the divorce?”
I sounded exactly like a Reno lawyer about to lose a client through an unfortunate reconciliation.
He nodded. “I . . . couldn’t ask her not to,” he said. “It wouldn’t be fair . . . not when all this has got her down.”
I looked at him.
“Which seems pretty stupid to me,” I said tartly. “If it’s got her down, it’s just when she needs you. But it hadn’t occurred to me . . . I mean, I thought she was bearing up amazingly. It’s my chief reason for believing she didn’t actually care a snap for Dexter Cromwell—except out of a sort of wounded heart that would clutch at anything.”
He didn’t say anything. His eyes were fastened on the road, his hands gripped the wheel harder.
“I mean,” I said, “that I think you’re being preternaturally blind.”
A dark flush crept up his cheek. We drove on in silence. After a minute or so we came to an enormous building set down on the lake shore that looked like a cross between a rustic cathedral and an alpine shooting lodge.
“That’s the place where the dance floor has the state line marked across it,” he said moodily. “The divorcées scurry across it at midnight to keep on the Nevada side. Just more of the Reno clowning.”
We passed that, and the young men looking for boll weevils, or Japanese beetles, or something, and turned in, not very far along, through a rustic gate set between two towering pines.
“Would this be where Cromwell lived?” I asked.
He nodded.
“I do hope we’ve got a jolly good reason for coming here, then,” I said frostily. “—Just in case anyone happens to be here to ask.”
“Don’t worry,” he said curtly. “There’ll be a China boy. He goes with the place.”
I had just started to ask him how he knew so much about it when he pulled up beside an empty corral and put on the brakes. Through the trees I could see a green lawn, and great spikes of delphinium against the gleaming white stucco of a little turreted chalet, and beyond it the glimmering sapphire of the lake.
The dead pine needles made a noiseless carpet for our feet as we went along to the terrace and crossed it. The door was open a little. We went in—Clem very much as if he knew what he was doing, and myself more than a little dubious. I stopped just inside the door. We were in a pine-panelled room with white bearskin rugs and soft red leather furniture. Clem crossed the room. I watched him uneasily. He didn’t tip-toe, but he kept on the rugs when he might have clattered on the pine floor if he hadn’t.
At the side of the fireplace across from the door we’d come in by, he fumbled at what looked like a quite ordinary small panel, and slid it back into the wall. I saw then that it was the door of a liquor closet that ran through to the other side, like a buttery opening into the kitchen. There were glasses and decanters and a couple of half-empty bottles in there. As I stood waiting by the door, quite motionless and not liking this in the least, Clem quietly lifted a small mahogany box off a shelf to his right in the side of the closet, put it down in front of him, opened it, stood looking down into it for a moment, started to close it and stopped, every muscle abruptly tensed.
He turned silently and held up his hand as I started to speak. I could hear the voices coming through the panel closet then, and I crept toward Clem, on the white bearskin rugs. The door at the other end of the concealed cupboard was closed, but I could hear the singsong tones of the China boy, and another voice that I knew well. I started to move away, my heart beating violently. Clem caught my wrist and held it.
Colonel Primrose was saying, “All right, Wu Lung. Just see if you can tell us if any of these people used to visit Mr. Cromwell.”
The China boy’s voice was high and cheerful.
“Velly okay. Wu Lung she never forget anybody face. Missy he allays say Wu Lung she never forget anybody face, ever.”
“Then look at these,” Colonel Primrose said patiently.
I could hear the ruffle of stiff polished paper, and that high, amused, polite voice: “Oh, see!” . . . as if Wu Lung had pounced forward with joy and recognition and helpfulness.
And then—and never could I have believed it for an instant if I had not heard it with my own ears—: “He Missy Bonner . . . he all time stay week-end with Clomwell!”
I stood there, for an interminable moment, paralyzed beyond any sensation at all, unable to think or to feel . . . and above all to realize, consciously, that I had heard that incredible, damning statement, so cheerful and so dreadful, and at the same time so straightforward.
I was almost unconscious of Clem’s fingers tightening on my wrist so that they were almost breaking it. I looked slowly around at him. His face was quite white, under his heavy tan, for a moment; then the blood rushed darkly into his cheeks. He let go my wrist, and stood there, stunned, just looking down.
Through the fog in my brain I heard the high sing-song voice.
“That Whitey. She all time come. She all time dlunk.—That Joe Cowboy. She come one two thlee time. She all time tell Clomwell she talk too much.—Missy Cou’cey, he all time here.—Missy Vicki, he not all time here, he all time telephone.—No . . . he not here.—No. No.”
I could see one photograph after another bringing no recognition. Wu Lung was still saying “No . . . she not here,” when Clem Bonner quietly closed the panel, turned without a word or sign, crossed the room quietly and went out. I followed. We got in the car, neither of us saying a word. The car moved silently on the pine needle carpet. Out on the road he gripped the wheel and put his foot down. We went along maniacally, the needle swinging dizzily at seventy-five, Clem’s face that of a man who had taken a sip of nectar and found it corroding acid . . . more terribly hurt than I would have thought it was possible for him to be.
I sat there, hanging on to the door as we lurched savagely around curves, trying desperately to think of something to say that wouldn’t sound cruelly banal . . . hurt terribly myself, unbelieving, and yet bound to believe. I couldn’t think of a thing, so I didn’t say anything.
He jammed the brakes on suddenly and drew up at an inn along the road.
“You go on back, will you?” he said quietly. “I’ll be along later.”
He got out and slammed the door shut. I moved over under the wheel, still too distressed and too upset to think or speak coherently. I just stared blindly at him.
He gave me a twisted sardonic smile.
“I guess we were both wrong,” he said. “So long.”
He went deliberately through the swinging doors of the inn bar as if they hadn’t been there. The doors swung violently back. I sat there staring stupidly after him. I don’t know how long I stayed there, but it must have been some time. A car, coming along at about the speed we’d been making, drew up sharply at the gas pump with a screech of brakes, and Sergeant Buck got out—his grim face solider granite and fishier-eyed as he spotted me. He picked up the water can and unscrewed the radiator cap.
Their car door opened again almost immediately, and Colonel Primrose came over to where I was sitting, my hand on the gear shift, my foot still motionless on the clutch.
“What are you doing up here?” he asked quickly. His eyes were probing, and worried.
“I . . . just came for the ride,” I said, making what must have been a pitiful effort to be casual.
“Then you go on back, at once,” he said. He was looking intently at me. “Listen . . . carefully,” he said. “There’s a killer around here—coldblooded, desperate, still at large. You could easily be in terrible danger.—I don’t want you off anywhere by yourself.”
He stopped, still looking intently at me. “—Do you know who killed Cromwell, and Vicki Ray?”
“No,” I said blankly. “I don’t. Should I?”
“You’ve never accused anybody, or expressed any opinion that any particular person did it?”
“No,” I said. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I haven’t.”
I didn’t realize, in the remotest degree, how mistaken that was . . . or how near it came to being fatally mistaken.
His face cleared.
“I . . . do know,” he said. “The case is broken—as soon as we get a couple of loose ends tied up. You go on back, and don’t stop on the way, and stay in the Washoe bar, or some place with other people.—Have you any idea where Clem Bonner is?”
“Not the foggiest, Colonel Primrose,” I said.
He nodded and went back to his car. There was a kind of stony triumph in the otherwise dead pan of Sergeant Phineas T. Buck as he brought the water can back. It was nothing to the triumph in my own face as I waited till they’d disappeared and went into the bar there to tell Clem Bonner that if he was planning to go on a bender, he’d better wait till it would be rather simpler to explain.
24
The clerk beckoned to me very discreetly as Clem and I came into the lobby of the Washoe an hour later. I went across to the desk.
“The police were here asking about Mrs. Bonner’s car, Mrs. Latham.”
He glanced to the right and left to see that we weren’t being overheard.
“I said you had it up at Tahoe. They said to ask you to bring it around to the station when you came, if you didn’t mind.”
I suppose I looked disturbed in spite of myself, for he added reassuringly, “I’m very confident everything’s quite all right, Mrs. Latham. But I did take the liberty of not mentioning it to Mrs. Bonner when she went out.”
He turned to my room box and brought out a couple of phone call slips and my key and handed, them to me.
“Mrs. Bonner went out with the young lady from Sun Mountain Ranch—Mrs. Wagner, I believed They were going out there to ride.”
I said “Thanks very much,” and went back out into the sun-baked street, thinking how extraordinarily au fait the clerk at the Washoe was with his guests’ goings and comings. I was thinking too that it was amusing how perfectly at ease I was when I knew those two were together. Murder, divorce, dope, gambling, racketeering . . . nothing could defile Polly Wagner’s high sanity, or Judy’s, now that she was coming back to herself again.
I stopped just outside the hotel doors to put on my dark glasses against the blinding white glare, and heard someone rapping vigorously on the window of the cocktail lounge.
I turned around. Whitey and Kaye Gorman and Cowboy Joe were there, motioning me to come in. I shook my head and pointed across the Truckee. Whitey raised the window and thrust a slightly battered ear out.
“How’s that?”
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m going to the police station.”
He waggled his head in disgust.
I went on to the car, parked it in front of the entrance to the Y. W. C. A., which always seemed curiously out of place under the police station, and went up the stairs. The desk sergeant took his feet down off a table hastily and got up.
“Right through there, lady,” he said.
I went through the inner room. A couple of men, hangdog and furtive, sat twirling their caps between their knees. There was also a man there not so hangdog, his head bandaged and his face—what showed of it—purple and black and yellow. He gave me a malignant glare out of swollen eyes. I had suspected that Mr. Steve Ewing would not care much for me after what had happened to him, but I hadn’t, some way, thought of him as a continuing menace. I went on into the sunny room with its filing cabinets and broad desks and the Bertillon stand against the wall with the small American flag stuck at the top. Bill Hogan was fingerprinting a boy who couldn’t have been older than my older one. They’d picked him up, I learned, trying to change a capful of quarters at a service station out the Truckee . . . which around these parts always meant a broken slot machine somewhere.
The boy went out, Colonel Primrose came in with a young man in a white work overall with the name of a garage sewed in red thread across the back. Colonel Primrose gave me a half-annoyed half-quizzical look and shook his head. I gathered he’d heard I came back with Clem.
“Did you bring the car?” he asked.
I nodded. “It’s out in front.”
Bill Hogan motioned to the garage man. They both leaned over the desk and looked out the window.
“That’s it all right. I ain’t making any mistake.”
I glanced from the two of them to Colonel Primrose, not understanding.
“I’ve been away on my vacation, or I’d been in sooner,” the man said.
“You took it out to Clinton Street?”
The man nodded.
“I picked it up like I do every night when it’s standing in front of the hotel after midnight, and took it in. That was about half-past twelve. About one-thirty Mrs. Bonner called up, and said she was walking home from a party, and would I mind taking the car out to the saloon on Fourth Street and Clinton and leave it there for her. Would I leave the keys in the usual place—we always leave ’em under the rubber floor mat if they don’t have an extra one, and she’d come off without hers—and take a taxi back and charge it to her. She’s always swell to work with, which most of ’em out here for the cure ain’t.—So I did, and then I picked it up again in Island Street near the hotel, about three.”
I looked at Colonel Primrose, still in the completest bewilderment.
“I asked her was anything wrong. She said no, everybody was having a lot of drink and she’d rather be in her own car doing the driving herself, which I didn’t blame her at all, the way some of these palookas drink. So, I took it out and left it.”
Colonel Primrose nodded.
“You’re sure it was Mrs. Bonner that phoned you?”
He spoke pleasantly, but I could hear the tenseness in his voice.
“Oh, sure.”
Bill Hogan moved uncomfortably.
“There’s no getting away from that, Colonel,” he said, as if he would very much have liked to get away from it if he could. “The girl at the switchboard put in the call to the garage for her at half-past one.”
Colonel Primrose shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I don’t believe it. I’m telling you it’s all wrong. Too many things are supposed to have happened in Mrs. Bonner’s room. It’s too much, Hogan. That weapon was in her room, it was taken from her room, it was found in her room, wrapped in her riding shirt, in her clothes hamper. And now a call for her car is put in from her room.”
He pointed down to a manila envelope on the desk.
“And all the time we have got there those hairs from Mrs. Bonner’s head that were taken from the hand of the murdered man, on the wheel of that car.”
Bill Hogan pulled the envelope toward him. It had “Coroner” printed on it in big black letters. He opened it and took out a long slide. I could see those bright red-gold hairs mounted in it. I have never known less what to think or what to do in my whole life.
Colonel Primrose didn’t look at me.
“Without those hairs,” he went on quietly, “what Mr. Nelson here says would be just about enough to convict Mrs. Bonner.—With them, it is absolutely impossible that she could have committed this crime.”
