Reno Rendezvous, page 19
And I heard—incredibly—Wu Lung’s high-pitched singsong voice coming from her heavily rouged lips:
“Hello. No—Missy Latham he come, but he go. He all time tly find Miss Bonner. Missy Bonner he gone long time, he gone Leno. Velly Okay.”
And I just sat there, staring like some newly made petrifaction, unable to believe my ears.
She put down the phone and looked at me, her eyebrows raised ever so slightly.
“That was your friend Colonel Primrose,” she said. “It’s too bad, too.—He’s just down at State Line—I heard the operator.”
My heart gave a quick leap, and died again, as I began to realize, in some kind of an unconscious way, bewildered and frightened, what this meant.
I said—and I was vaguely conscious of being surprised that my voice should sound perfectly normal—“Are you mad, Kaye Gorman?”
A queer light, frightened and angry, flickered for an instant in her big blue eyes and was gone as she answered, with her steady hard-edged voice from which all the plush creaminess had vanished: “No. I’m not. I’m just not taking any more chances with you, Mrs. Latham.”
I suppose any normally bright person would have realized, fully and consciously, at that point, what I utterly failed to realize except in a frightened and unthinking way. I sat there, staring at her. The only sound in the room was the lip-lap, lip-lap of the tiny waves on the sandy beach, and somewhere out on the blue sparkling water the long lengthening roar of a speed boat.
Then I started to get up—just thinking, I suppose, in my simple way, that I’d had enough of this and I might as well leave. There was a sudden hardening of Kaye Gorman’s smooth face and a sudden movement of her hand. I stopped, staring at the small blue revolver she held resting on her knee.
“Sit down,” she said.
I sat. I don’t think it occurred to me to do anything else.
“And don’t act like a fool. I want to know how many people you’ve told.”
Her voice was as cold as a steel trap.
I suppose it would sound ridiculous to say that I wasn’t afraid, then, when I was . . . afraid with a deeper, more profound fear than I’ve ever known it was possible to feel. But in some queer way I wasn’t actually immediately aware of it, unless of course I was so aware of it that I was totally numbed. Or perhaps it was because it was so bizarre and incredible, and because I still didn’t really understand, and genuinely didn’t know what she was talking about, that I could do nothing but ask, blankly:
“Told . . . what?”
Her eyes narrowed sharply, her face flushed a hot angry red. She uncurled from her seat on the sofa and got abruptly to her feet.
“Look here, Mrs. Latham—if you think being funny, or stupid, is going to help you, you’re wrong. One more life’s nothing to me . . .”
And then, as it dawned on me, and I understood, in a way, without understanding why or how, I stared at her so utterly and I suppose so obviously dumbfounded, that she stood there for an instant, completely rigid, as if some violent electric shock had rooted her speechless to the rug. The awfullest kaleidoscope of doubt, fear, anger and then abject horror passed slowly through her eyes.
The blue muzzle in her hands wavered as she took a step toward me, her face perfectly ashen.
“You mean you didn’t know I killed Dex Cromwell and Vicki?”
Each word dropped separate and distinct from her lips, not made of sound but of fear, tangible and distilled, as if all other quality had gone and only that was left.
I was too dazed to remember now, but I think I must have sat there, shaking my head back and forth. My hands still resting on the arms of the chair were like lumps of ice.
Suddenly her body stiffened. She shot forward, her eyes burning into mine like hard blue coals.
“You’re lying!” she whispered. “You’re trying to fool me again!”
I whispered too: “Again?”
“Yes, again. I let you fool me once, into thinking you had made a mistake, you really did think it was me, not Vicki, with that dress—not because you’re clever, Grace Latham, but because I couldn’t figure out how you could have seen me . . . not till last night, and I sat at the table you were at and saw you could see the door of the powder room through the little glass at the top . . . That’s when I knew you’d seen me . . . and that’s what you meant when you screamed ‘It’s Kaye Gorman!’ ”
She straightened up and stared down at me, her voice quieter, but just as cold and inexorable.
“I know your sort. Were you likely to mistake a cheap piece of chantilly for a hand-made alençon? And you didn’t fool me—I knew what you meant when you said ‘I thought it was you,’ trying to pretend you’d made a mistake!”
She stopped abruptly, her full mouth drawn to a thin cruel line. I found myself thinking vaguely that this must have been the way she’d looked when she found Clem’s family had lost their money. The bitter contempt in her voice must have been the same, too, when she found she hadn’t got what she’d married him for.
She looked down at the revolver in her hand.
I made a supreme attempt to control my nerves and my voice.
“Listen,” I said. “You’re absolutely crazy. I hadn’t the faintest idea it was you—it’s nothing but your guilty conscience that’s making you read all that into what I said. But I suppose it doesn’t make any difference, now, that I just happen to be one of those people that can’t tell machine-made lace from any other, and hardly know one kind from another, and care less.”
“You mean—Vicki hadn’t told you that Dex told her all about a girl who lived at Tucker’s while he was here before? Oh, he didn’t mention her name, but Vicki put two and two together and made four. You mean she didn’t tell you that?”
And quite suddenly I remembered Vicki in the hotel room just before Colonel Primrose came in, saying “Did somebody ever tell you a story, not mentioning names, but so you can put two and two together?”
I shook my head, but it was too late.
“I don’t believe you, Mrs. Latham.—She told someone. She told me she had, so she’d be safe, she said.”
I know I had the desperate vague idea that I ought to go on talking, to keep her talking, if I could.
“I still don’t know why you did it . . . were you in love with Dexter Cromwell?”
She gave a quick curious laugh that was almost a sob.
“I certainly was not. It doesn’t matter to you. That’s my business.”
“It’s my business to know why you tried to make it appear that Judy did it.”
She laughed again.
“It would be yours if they weren’t going to find you up here after I’ve left, so everybody’s going to think you did it yourself to save your niece. And it’s simple, anyway—she was a natural.”
She’d taken a step toward me, the pupils of her eyes black pin points in the great blue irises, her hand tightening on the blue gun, its muzzle bigger and more terrifying as I tried to keep my eyes on her eyes, not on it.
“And you’ll do just as well. Nobody knows I’m here. My car’s hidden down the road, I’ve got an alibi. They’re going to find powder burns on your face and your fingerprints on this gun. And they’ll hush it up—Reno doesn’t like scandal, it hurts business.”
She took a step toward me, and another. I could feel my heart pounding painfully in my throat. Every other part of me was paralyzed. Even then, I can remember thinking, like an impartial and quite detached spectator, that from her point of view at least it was pretty ingenious. Next to Clem and Judy, I had the greatest motive for getting rid of Dex Cromwell, and I’d seen Vicki going down toward the District Attorney’s office.
She was quite close to me, and I closed my eyes. Except for her voice and the pounding of my own heart, there was no sound, except that lip-lap, lip-lap of the waves outside. I’ve wondered sometimes, especially since I’ve known Colonel Primrose, what I’d do if I knew absolutely that I was going to die—whether I could face it with dignity, or whether I’d go all to pieces. Now, as death came step by step closer to me, guided by a hand that knew none of the civilized virtures of mercy, or honesty—nothing but overweening ambition and pride—I found myself waiting perfectly motionless and relaxed, with no thought at all in my mind but that I wouldn’t want my two children to think I’d taken my own life . . . or for Colonel Primrose to think so.
Kaye Gorman had crossed the white bearskin rug. I could hear her booted foot touch the pine floor, not a yard from my chair.—And just as it did, suddenly and quite grotesquely I heard someone whistling, outside by the corral.
My heart gave a great leap. The cold shadow of the blue steel lifted from my face. I opened my eyes as I heard the sharp stifled intake of Kaye’s breath. She was standing motionless there.
The whistling stopped abruptly. I heard footsteps on the terrace, and a voice, young and pleasant, call out, “Hi, Wu Lung—you here? Can I borrow the halter on the corral post?”
I opened my mouth to scream. The revolver rose instantly to within ten inches of my face. “Don’t you make a sound or it’ll be both of us!” Kaye Gorman whispered. She took a step back and turned half-way toward the door, and I heard Wu Lung’s voice rise from her mouth:
“Velly okay. Missy Clomwell she no want long time.”
The man laughed. “I’ll bring it back tomorrow.”
Then I heard his steps going back across the tiled terrace, and my heart died with them. He was still whistling merrily, and I sat there, the blue muzzle of the revolver just by my face as she stepped silently back toward me, wondering rather idly how long he would stay, knowing she couldn’t shoot me while he was out there . . .
The whistling stopped suddenly, and the man began to sing.
Kaye Gorman’s face was very white. She caught her full red lower lip in her teeth, and still keeping that gun pointed square at me, took three quick steps to the door.
The singing voice still went on cheerfully outside.
“What in God’s name is he doing?” she whispered, and I realized with a start of surprise that she wasn’t cool and coldblooded any more. She came back and sat down on the sofa again, across the rug from me, the revolver never wavering . . . and I saw then, utterly incredibly, for the singing voice outside had never stopped an instant, the door behind Kaye Gorman opening very slowly, and then looming in it the huge circus-garbed figure of Sergeant Phineas T. Buck.
I don’t know what happened then. I only saw the sharp flash of fright in Kaye’s blue eyes as she saw my eyes fastened behind her. I could feel myself fading slowly out as she leaped to her feet and whirled around, and then sprang past me toward the door, and I can only vaguely remember Sergeant Buck’s clearing the sofa in one gigantic stride, and the bearskin rug going neatly out from under his feet as he landed on it, and his terrific crash onto the pine floor. The last thing I heard was a bitterly emphatic string of old Army expressions, and the first thing I remember after that was opening my eyes and closing them again, knowing I was safe, and that the arms tight around me were Colonel Primrose’s, and the lips whispering, “My dear, my dearest!” against my forehead, where the cold blue steel had almost touched, were his too. I was vaguely aware that in some way the singing young man had been his device, but I was still far too dazed to realize that I had been part of a trap, and that Sergeant Buck was quite right when he said that Colonel Primrose would gladly hang his own grandmother—if and when the necessity arose.
27
I didn’t go back to Reno, not that day. Judy and Polly came up . . . Judy who hadn’t been anywhere near Tahoe, and who, in one of those Hardyesque coincidences, had actually been going up to her apartment in the elevator just as I slipped down the stairs by it, to avoid Colonel Primrose if he’d come out of Mrs. de Courcey’s room while I was waiting.
I went down with them, around the lake and by way of Carson City. We turned in the road beyond the Bowers’, where a sign in the shape of the golden sun with a ring-necked squirrel sitting on it pointed to Polly’s ranch, nestling in the pine trees at the foot of the smooth dun-colored hills. A couple of Basque shepherd dogs asleep on the wide verandah got up and barked once, and came to greet us, wagging their lovely tails. A cowboy on a pinto pony, with a small boy in chaps and a big Western hat hanging stoutly on to the pommel, ambled past us and waved to Polly. The smell of the pines, and the white curl of smoke rising from the cook house, and the odor of lamb stew and coffee coming out of it with the clatter of dishes, were perfectly divine and sane and ordinary. And over it all, the pine trees and the half-acre of sunflowers and lupin and scotch broom beyond the row of old lombardy poplars, was a peace and homeliness that I wouldn’t have thought could exist less than fifteen miles from the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, with its clatter and jangle and bars and gambling and all its raggle-taggle tinsel glamor.
We went to Polly’s cottage, not far from the ranch house. It was a minute log cabin with a fire place and maple furniture and hooked rugs, all cozy and homey and the sort of place it would be fun to spend six weeks in even if one wasn’t getting a divorce. And it was there that evening, when the hot sun went down behind the mountains across the valley, and Polly and Judy and I had finished supper that the China boy brought on a tray for us, and lighted a log fire, for it gets cold out on the desert at night, that Colonel Primrose and Sergeant Buck came.
“You’ll never forgive me, will you?” Colonel Primrose said. He sat down beside me on the sofa, with a rueful smile. “If I’d had the faintest idea she’d misunderstood that cry of yours when we found Vicki . . .”
He shook his head.
“As a matter of fact, I hadn’t thought you could be in any definite danger, not till I called and heard that imitation China talk.—I spent six years out there, and she wasn’t really very good at it anyway. Well, I saw something was up then, and realizing that Buck and I would be pretty late—I called up that lad at the garage. And I told him not to go inside, because—to be quite frank with you—I didn’t want Mrs. Gorman to get alarmed and make a getaway. And he couldn’t locate the place right away, so Buck and I got there at just about the same time.”
He shook his head again, very soberly.
“And of course, one of the most curious things about this whole business was that she didn’t remember she was across the state line, and make a play about extradition . . . since being across that line was the salient point in Cromwell’s murder.”
I suppose I looked puzzled, or maybe only just as I’d looked ever since I first decided to come to Reno, as I can’t, offhand, think of any moment since I arrived there that I hadn’t been puzzled about something, in one degree or another.
“Did she get away?” I asked.
His face was grave as he lighted his cigar with a rush from the basket on the hearth.
“In a sense. She got away through the trees to her car—she’d hidden it along the road—and headed back to Nevada. Buck picked her up near Brockway. She stayed ahead of him all the way up Mount Rose . . . and went off the road, where the sharp turn is. Doing about seventy.”
I realized then, of course, why they’d sent us around through Carson, instead of letting us come the shorter way, over the mountain. In my mind’s eye I could see again that curve on the narrow rock-strewn road where Clem and I had skidded, and the sunny valley of the Washoe, two thousand feet below us down the sheer brown rock walls. I closed my eyes. I could see, quite easily, Kaye’s car racing madly around that sharp bend, and failing . . . so that she paid in one swift awful instant—eternally and irrevocably, according to the oldest law of justice—a life for a life . . . except that this was one life for two lives.
We sat silently a moment, gazing into the fire.
“Why did she do it?” Judy said at last, her voice scarcely louder than a whisper.
But before Colonel Primrose could answer we heard a car come into the ranch yard and a tap at the door. Sergeant Buck opened it; and his face congealed to a more glacial frigidity than it had ever done even for me as Mrs. de Courcey came in, handsome and smartly gowned. Clem Bonner followed her.
Mary de Courcey sat down across the room, and Clem stood by the high chintz-draped window, his pipe in his hand, his dark sombre eyes fixed on the bright nimbus of Judy’s head, glowing against the flames. She didn’t look at him, and my heart sank, further even than it had done at Lake Tahoe as I waited to join the ranks of the inglorious dead.
“My dear, I think it’s perfectly marvellous you escaped at all!” Mrs. de Courcey’s voice babbled. “It must have been simply harrowing—mustn’t it, John?”
Sergeant Buck, standing by the door, gave her a glance as warm—to use one of his own expressions—as Muley’s goose nine days dead. Colonel Primrose smiled at me.
“If hereafter you’ll only do as you’re told . . .” he said placidly.
“Do you mean you actually knew it was Kaye who’d done this, when I saw you up at Tahoe this morning?” I demanded.
He nodded.
“Positively and without a doubt,” he said. “And I might as well tell you about it—and not just as a sort of concluding formality. There’s still a complication or two in this business.”
His eyes rested with an amused twinkle on Judy, and on Clem.
“Out at that Tahoe service station I needed just two things: the date of Mrs. Gorman’s arrival in Reno three years ago, and the date of her divorce. And, to a lesser degree, the date of her second marriage.”
Judy turned sharply in her chair, her gray eyes questioning.
“For that was the whole and entire point of this,” Colonel Primrose went on calmly. “As you all know, the only thing that gives a Reno divorce a semblance of validity is the six weeks’ residence. Well, Mrs. Gorman came here on July 11th, got her decree at 2:30 on the afternoon of August 22nd, and married Jake Gorman at 2:40 the same day. She had Clem’s power of attorney, and there was no trouble about anything.
