“I was interested in two general points from the outset. It seemed to me very odd that Mrs. Gorman should have come back to Reno. She had secure possession of nearly a million and a half, her former husband’s wife meant nothing to her, and she had no way of knowing that her former husband would be here. Her coming back was very strange on the face of it . . . for the Kaye Gormans of this world burn their bridges. They don’t like people to see how rickety they were. They obliterate their trails—they don’t come back on them.

  “The second point that interested me was that piling up of evidence against Judy Bonner . . . the cunning that was too cunning. I thought—if some of you will pardon me—that it pointed from the beginning to a woman. At the same time it didn’t appear there was any woman here who had a particular reason for animosity toward Judy. And in fact that Mrs. Gorman really had none was one of the things that made this so infernally diabolical.”

  He stopped to relight his cigar.

  “All this was complicated by Vicki’s death—and in a sense made clear by it. For wherever we looked, we ran across that curious little man Mr. Tucker. He was the key to the situation, actually. There was no connection between him and Cromwell, but there he always was, just the same . . . and I began to think he had some connection with Cromwell’s murderer. When Vicki was killed I saw generally what it was all about. She wasn’t here three years ago, but she had one advantage over the rest of us—she knew Mr. Tucker. And knowing him, she figured one thing out . . . much too neatly for her own good—namely, the motive for the murder. And I looked up the obvious point, and found that Kaye Gorman had lived at Mr. Tucker’s boarding house when she got her divorce.

  “Well, after Cromwell had got his divorce, in July of the year Mrs. Gorman was here, he lived for some time up at that cottage at Tahoe—on the California side. I went up there . . . and the puzzle fitted together in a flash. There’s a China boy there—about sixty years old—and by good luck he’d been there for some years. I showed him a group of photographs of people I thought had been Cromwell’s guests.”

  I saw poor Clem Bonner’s face flush darkly. I couldn’t help glancing at Judy. She was sitting there, in riding clothes that she wears even better than she does a dance frock, bending forward looking at the fire, enchantingly lovely, her gray eyes sun-flecked like forest pools under her long gold-tipped lashes and burnished hair . . . and blissfully unconscious of what Colonel Primrose was bound to say—that she had been up there, too long, with the man she had planned to marry . . . at a time, as the Archbishop of Canterbury said in a more impressive connection, when she was not in a position to entertain a proposition of marriage.

  “And he recognized the first picture I showed him,” Colonel Primrose went on, with a calm that I was far from sharing, and that seemed to me even a little callous. “He said, ‘that’s Mrs. Bonner, she stayed week-ends with Cromwell.’ ”

  28

  Judy Bonner stared at him, her jaw dropping, a look of such perfect denial in her eyes that I was still more shocked, some way, than I’d been before.

  Colonel Primrose chuckled a little.

  “It would have been rather . . . misleading, if anyone had been listening in,” he said. “For it was Kaye Gorman’s picture I was showing him. Of course he recognized her as Mrs. Bonner—she was Mrs. Bonner, when she spent those week-ends there. And that must have been when she was getting her decree, because, as you know, at this time she hadn’t been here weekends . . . she came on Monday.”

  I sank back against the cushions, suddenly, and very much ashamed of myself. Clem’s face flushed again as my eyes met his. Then I looked at Judy . . . she must put two and two together, I thought, and see what Clem had been thinking. And I saw, looking at her, grave and innocent and attentive, that she hadn’t—the idea had simply never occurred to her.

  “And by the way, Clem—what did you go up to Tahoe for?”

  “Kaye told me Cromwell said he had a letter of Judy’s, that wouldn’t let her change her mind about marrying him,” Clem said shortly. “She told me where to find it. I supposed that’s what Judy had been up there for, the night I got back.”

  Judy’s eyes darkened indignantly. “That’s not true! I . . . did go after a letter, but not that sort! And anyway, it was gone. A . . . a friend of mine had already got it. But I didn’t know that then.”

  It would be wrong to describe Sergeant Buck’s face as just red. It was the color of a maple sugar bucket that had been polished and allowed to tarnish again.

  Polly Wagner giggled irrepressibly.

  “Ah well,” Colonel Primrose said hastily, “I’m afraid Kaye was using the old business of discrediting her successor. Well, I knew then, of course, what it was all about. Mrs. Gorman had spent one or more week-ends out of Nevada—and one was enough. She hadn’t made up her time, her divorce was obtained on perjured evidence, on her own part and on that of her witness—one Mr. Tucker. The penalty for perjury in the state of Nevada is from one to fourteen years in the state penitentiary.

  “One person, of course, knew all that—namely Mr. Dexter Cromwell. Well, at one-thirty Tuesday morning, when someone called for Mrs. Bonner’s car, Mr. Tucker was under the eye of about eleven young women. That left Mrs. Gorman . . . and she had far more to lose than Mr. Tucker. There was the perjury penalty in either case. In Mrs. Gorman’s case there was also the fact that she’d just raked in about a million and a half dollars on false pretenses: namely, the false pretense that she was the wife of Jake Gorman. She had one of three things to do. She could pay blackmail to Cromwell all her life, she could give up her million and a half, or she could get Mr. Cromwell out of the way. I imagine two of those things didn’t occur to her very seriously.

  “Well, she and Cromwell had plenty to talk about, that night. It’s even quite possible that Cromwell suggested a drive, and that Kaye—knowing Reno, and Cromwell—suggested the race track, where they’d be undisturbed. They left the River House and went by the hotel. She went in, ostensibly to go up to her own room; learned, from Whitey, probably, just as Mrs. Latham did, that Judy was out. She knew Mrs. Latham had gone home, tired from her trip, to go to bed. She went up to Judy’s room—probably by the corridor window, the fire escape and the balcony windows—got the candle holder, the shirt and the hairs, and put in the call for Judy’s car. It was while she was up there that Clem had his scene with Cromwell, who, of course, was waiting for her in his car alone. Clem left, and Kaye came out of the hotel, I’d imagine by the service entrance so as not to be seen. She and Cromwell went out to the race track. After she’d killed him she ran back to where the garage man had left the car—everybody in the hotel uses that garage, by the way, and they were leaving the key under the rubber mat even when Kaye was out here last. She drove the car back to Island Street, near the Washoe, saw Judy in the bar, between two and two-thirty, went up to Judy’s room again and planted the shirt and the weapon in the clothes hamper . . . being careful, naturally, not to get blood on Judy’s car or on herself. Well—it was desperate and opportunist, but it succeeded, up to a point.”

  Colonel Primrose’s black parrot eyes twinkled as he looked at me.

  “And so,” he said, very urbanely, “we come to the only glimmer of joy and good will in all this painful business. Namely, that Mrs. Bonner of course doesn’t have to go on with her divorce action.”

  And Judy stared at him, only half comprehending, and so did I.

  “It’s purely a routine matter for the family lawyer.—Kaye Gorman’s divorce from Clem Bonner was quite illegal, her marriage to Jake Gorman was quite illegal. And consequently Clem Bonner’s marriage to Judy Carroll was quite illegal. In short, Mrs. Bonner, you are Mrs. Bonner . . . only by courtesy. You not only don’t have to get a divorce—you can’t. Well, it does simplify matters, doesn’t it?”

  There was the oddest silence in the little room, Clem Bonner and Judy staring at each other for the first time. And Polly Wagner giggled again, and started to speak, and stopped just as Judy recovered herself.

  “It . . . it does, rather, doesn’t it?” she said. She pushed her bright hair back from her forehead with a bewildered little gesture. “I mean . . . it means we’ve never been married? We’ve just been . . . just been living in sin . . . like they do in the movies!”

  Clem Bonner came slowly across the room from the window, his lean brown face breaking into a grin of the kind I’d remembered, that made him really recognizable to me for the first time since he’d come to Reno. But even as he grinned there was no mistaking the depth of feeling in his voice.

  “Miss Carroll,” he said gravely, “I’m ashamed of you.—And I want you to come down to the court house with me, right away . . . and let me make an honest woman out of you.”

  Judy looked at him, her gray sunflecked eyes dancing behind their long lashes, a smile trembling in the corners of her red mouth.

  She took a step toward him. “I always knew you’d do the right thing by me, Mr. Bonner . . .”

  The door closed behind them, alone together at last . . . but it was a long time before we heard them move, out there in the desert night. And it was not very long after that that Clem came racing back.

  “We’ve got to have witnesses!” he shouted.

  Mrs. de Courcey jumped up. “Oh, lovely!” she cried. “Oh, isn’t it charming! Isn’t it charming, John! Come on!”

  Clem dashed out again. Mary de Courcey stood expectantly by the door. For a moment or two a combat that if it had been on an Olympian scale would have shaken the universe to its foundations waged there in Polly Wagner’s room. I realized, in a flash of intuition, that Sergeant Buck, faithful unto death, was not allowing any woman to get his colonel at a marriage license bureau with a pen in his hands.

  I held my breath . . . and Fate materialized in the room, in the charming shy young form of Polly Wagner. She looked at Sergeant Buck, and at Colonel Primrose, and at me. Then she got up, went over to the door, and took both Mary de Courcey and Sergeant Buck firmly by the arm.

  “Let’s us go,” she said. “They’re going to need somebody with influence, to get a license this time of night.”

  “Okay, miss,” Sergeant Buck said.

  He came to what was in effect, if not in fact, a smart attention, just barely failed to salute, held the door open, and followed Mrs. de Courcey and Polly out into the night.

  I looked at Colonel Primrose, and then I laughed until I ached, and after a moment he laughed too. Then he said, very soberly, “I came up to your room, you know, just to tell you to keep away from Kaye. But Mary de Courcey got hold of me. She’d got herself in rather a jam.”

  I nodded.

  “I overheard her talking to you,” I said. “I really thought, in kind of a vague way, that she’d done it herself—telling you she was rich now, and asking you to forget . . .”

  He was looking at me so oddly that I stopped. He shook his head, smiling.

  “She was only asking me to forget she’d married de Courcey and not me, twenty years ago,” he said.

  “And . . . marry her now?” I asked.

  “Something of the sort.”

  “And . . . are you?”

  He shook his head. “There’s only one woman, my dear,” he said, very earnestly . . . and that’s as far as he got. There was a crashing knock on the door, and Sergeant Buck came in.

  “You’re wanted outside a minute, sir,” he said.

  If that iron face had ever expressed an emotion, there was a faint tinge of satisfaction on it at that moment.

  Colonel Primrose’s black eyes snapped. But after all, one doesn’t go through West Point for nothing. He got up, nodded to me and went out.

  Sergeant Buck closed the door solidly, and stood firmly planted with his massive back against it. I knew now exactly how Steve Ewing had felt, locked alone with him, before the woman in the room below had heard the crash of breaking furniture. My heart sank. Sergeant Buck looked too much like a gray desperate fortress ringed around with besiegers whose numbers were growing and whose methods were becoming more insidious.

  He cleared his throat, his face turning that odd tarnished color. We had, I knew, Sergeant Buck and I, come at last to a showdown.

  “I want to state, ma’am,” he said, out of one corner of his mouth, “that I’m against the Colonel marrying.”

  “Of course, Sergeant,” I said hastily. “I quite understand.”

  He cleared his throat again. The brassy hue of his granite visage deepened alarmingly.

  “I want to state further, ma’am,” he said, with a menacing glare, “if, irregardless of what’s good for him, he’s bound to get himself married . . . why, maybe it’d better be you than some other people.”

  He then nodded stiffly, and started out. And I recovered, I think, in remarkably short time, considering everything.

  “You . . . you’re just . . . making the best of a bad job, Sergeant,” I managed to say.

  He stopped, his face brightening for an instant, as if he had been trying to find some way of putting it.

  “That’s it, ma’am,” he said, gratefully.

  Then his face congealed again.

  “No offense meant, ma’am.”

  “None taken, Sergeant,” I said.

  He opened the door. In the headlights of Clem’s car I saw Colonel Primrose coming back to the cottage.

  “Good-night, ma’am,” Sergeant Buck said, grimly.

 

 

  Leslie Ford, Reno Rendezvous

 

 

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