Reno Rendezvous, page 6
“Surely,” I said.
I started for my horse. Colonel Primrose followed me, and held him while I put my foot in the stirrup.
“I’m sorry!” I whispered.
I hadn’t meant to say anything at all.
He didn’t answer, but I thought his hand tightened just a little on my arm as he helped me up.
“Have the caretaker phone for a taxi,” he said.
I gave Dragonfly his mouth, and he broke into a gallop. He couldn’t get away from all that fast enough for me.
7
It was half-past seven when I got back to the Washoe. The doorman’s hand was not half-way to the handle when I had the door open. “Pay him, please,” I said, realizing I had no money with me.
I dashed through the door, and stopped abruptly just inside it. Sergeant Buck, in his circus outfit, was there in front of me, methodically putting quarters into one of the slot machines in the hotel lobby.
“Stop dashing about like a chicken with its head off!” I said to myself sharply, catching a startling glimpse of my face in the mirrored pillar behind the palms. It was just in time, for Buck turned around and gave me a fishily indifferent glance. Then he gathered a large handful of quarters from the trough at the bottom and moved on to the next machine.
“Has Mrs. Bonner come back?” I asked the clerk at the desk as he turned to get my key.
“Not yet, Mrs. Latham.”
I started to the elevator, and stopped half-way there. Mr. Hogan had told one of his men to get Dexter Cromwell’s mail and check up on his messages. Perhaps, when they got to his friends . . . I turned back to the desk.
“I’ll take Mrs. Bonner’s mail up,” I said.
“There’s no mail, Mrs. Latham. But somebody’s been trying to get her. A Mr. Charles Baker. He’s checked out now, on the evening plane.”
The clerk handed me a whole sheaf of telephone slips. I looked quickly at them. They began about two o’clock.
I looked up at him. “Mrs. Bonner was in till after three,” I said.
“Yes, Mrs. Latham—but the maid said you didn’t want her disturbed. And she hasn’t been getting much sleep, you know!”
He smiled playfully.
“I didn’t know,” I said as coldly as I could. “And I didn’t know you took your guests’ problems as your own.”
His face fell ludicrously.
“Why, Mrs. Latham, we only try to be helpful. Many of our guests—especially if they’re socially prominent as Mrs. Bonner,—have to be protected from all sorts of . . . of intrusion. It’s a recognized part of our service.”
“Then I beg your pardon,” I said.
“Certainly, Mrs. Latham,” he said graciously. “We have many problems that the ordinary management of a first-class hotel doesn’t have. We have to use considerable discretion in dealing with them.”
“I’m sure you do,” I said. I really didn’t want to be outdone in suavity and worldly wisdom by a hotel clerk in a buckaroo outfit.
“And—if you’ll pardon my mentioning it—you might suggest to Mrs. Bonner that she could be a leetle mite more careful with her car, Mrs. Latham. A man from police headquarters was in asking whether she kept it in a garage or parked it in the street all night. The police here are—well, nice, but nosey . . . ha, ha!”
“I’ll tell her,” I said—thinking that they were going to be a lot nosier before they were through. I went on to the elevator, dreadfully aware that the chase was on, and realizing fully that Judy’s car was only a blind. Which shows how wrong one can be, no matter how many facts are staring her in the face.
I took a bath and changed my clothes. Then I went in Judy’s rose and gray sitting room and turned on the lights. For a while I just sat there, and then I poured myself a drink of scotch and let it stand until the soda was flat while I paced the floor, wishing to Heaven Judy would come back. Wishing I’d never come to Reno . . . Wishing I’d used my head and opened the left door instead of the right. Wishing everything I could think of, except that I hadn’t taken those damning red-gold hairs. I was glad I’d had sense enough to do that, no matter how badly I’d bungled the doing. I still hadn’t destroyed them, it occurred to me abruptly—and also that I’d better do it at once.
I turned back from the open window where I’d come to rest for a moment in my pacing about, and started toward my door. As I reached it I heard a sound at Judy’s door, and stopped, my heart almost bursting with relief. She’d come at last, then. I rushed madly across the room and flung the door open . . . and drew back. It wasn’t Judy—it was the hat check girl from the River House.
“Oh!” I said. “Won’t you come in?”
She came in. I knew by the strange guarded expression in her eyes that she knew something was wrong. Whether she knew what it was I didn’t know. She came in quietly, took off her big white felt Stetson—autographed by everybody who’s bought her a drink since the pre-Rodeo festivities had begun; it looked already like a page out of the phone book—and slung it on a chair.
“Where’s Mrs. Bonner?” she asked, biting her full red lower lip thoughtfully and looking at me with narrowed lids.
“She went out riding, about three,” I said. “With Joe, at some ranch. Where would it be?”
“With Joe? Bar B. W., then,” she said slowly, still gnawing at her lip, tapping her booted toe on the floor.
“Do you want to call her?” I asked, seeing her eyes rest on the phone for an instant.
“She wouldn’t be there now. Unless she and Joe . . . went a long way . . . or got lost.”
She had a slow lazy way of speaking, as if nothing mattered very much, least of all time.
“Is there any danger of their getting lost?” I asked, rather perturbed.
She looked at me a long time.
“Joe’s got a way of getting lost—if it’s convenient,” she answered coolly. A little smile—not a very pleasant little smile at that—creased the full petal-textured flesh at the corner of her ripe mouth into three provocative dimples.
“Meaning?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing.”
She cracked her black crop smartly against her boot, and gave a short little laugh.
“Only—don’t let Cowboy Joe’s south’n drawl and open countenance fool you, Mrs. Latham.”
She got up and walked aimlessly around the room, humming a tune.
“What are you trying to say, Miss . . . ?” I started.
“Vicki’s the name,” she put in for me. “Vicki Ray. The Ray’s short for Eisenbeis, which is too hard for a girl to pack around with her. And would I like a drink? I sure would. This yours?”
She pointed to the glass on the chromium and rose bar.
I nodded. She took it in the bathroom and poured it down the drain, and came back, her nose wrinkled with distaste.
“There’s something about a dead drink that gets me down,” she said in her slow fashion. “I guess it’s a complex. I don’t like anything dead. I don’t like to see these ring neck squirrels. You see them all over the road, coming home early in the morning. I guess the headlights blind them and they can’t get out of the way. Or dead birds. I don’t like to see dead birds.”
She mixed herself a drink.
“I guess you think I’m goofy, talking about things being dead.”
“Oh no, not at all,” I said. “I don’t like dead things either.”
She sat down, spread her feet apart and sat bending over, her elbows on her white tight-breeched knees, her glass suspended between them in both hands, swishing the amber liquor around in it.
“Does Mrs. Bonner know Dex is dead?” she asked, without looking up; and added, “Officially, I mean?”
I suppose I’d been expecting something like it, because it didn’t surprise me, somehow. It seemed a perfectly natural continuation of what she’d been saying.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Do you? Officially, I mean?”
She shook her head. Then she gave me a slow, startlingly authentic Mona Lisa smile, and said lazily, “Don’t get me wrong. I know it because a friend of mine on the force called me up and told me to get under cover, if I needed to—hell’d be breaking loose before morning.”
She drained her glass and got up. “I told him I didn’t need to cover up—see?”
She poured another drink. I wouldn’t have realized even then that she was already pretty tight if she hadn’t missed her glass with the syphon and sent a spray all over the rose linen curtains. She steadied herself and aimed better the second time.
Then she turned around and looked at me, not smiling this time. “I don’t need to cover up—see?” she repeated. A belligerent note crept into her slow voice.
I nodded.
“I’ve got an alibi. I live at a boarding house in Mill Street.”
She sat down again.
“It sounds like Jane Austen,” I observed.
She looked up. “Don’t know her. Is she taking the cure?”
I shook my head. It didn’t matter. The cure at Bath in 1805 wouldn’t mean much to Vicki who’d taken the cure at Reno.
“Well, anyway,” she said. “Your landlord keeps an eye on you, in boarding houses. He’s your witness.”
I suppose I looked puzzled. I felt so.
“You’ve got to have a witness when you get your decree, to swear you spent your six weeks in Reno, not in California,” she said. “You’ve got to be here part of every day. Not that they all do it, but that’s the law. Anyway, Mr. Tucker knows I came in early last night. He sits up till everybody’s in, just like my mother always did. He’s done it for years—Kaye says he did it when she stayed there. All bundled up in his overcoat in front of the kitchen fire. Last night he was waiting up for two girls who’d been up to Tahoe. They get their decrees tomorrow. I guess he doesn’t want anything to go wrong, so they have to hold over a day. He’d got their room rented for tomorrow night.”
That was pretty puzzling too. I didn’t know then that if a “divorcée” is detained out of the state so that she misses a day or two in her six weeks’ residence, she can make up her time at the end. It’s important, because the whole theory of Nevada divorce is built on the idea that six weeks’ continuous residence gives the state court valid jurisdiction in a case. They’re strict about it, because it’s the only thing that gives any pretense of genuine legality to the divorce mill.
“All I mean is, Mr. Tucker knows I was in last night,” Vicki said. “So it just happens this is once it isn’t me that has to cover up. It’s . . . somebody else.”
Her full red lips curved in a curious little smile.
“For instance?” I inquired.
“You’d be surprised,” she drawled.
She looked a thousand miles past the polished toe of her boot.
“Well, they say blackmail’s nice work if you can get it.”
“And . . . can you?”
Her slow smile deepened.
“Wouldn’t a lot of people like to know?”
She leaned forward.
“Has anybody ever told you a story, not mentioning names, but working out so you can put two and two together—”
She broke off abruptly, looking oddly at me again, and just sat there, staring at the floor:
“You don’t seem to care a lot if Dex is dead,” I said, after a while. It had been in my mind for some time, but I hadn’t meant to say it. I was surprised hearing it come out.
Her face tightened.
“Sure, I care,” she said. “But he’s dead, so there’s not much I can do about it, is there?”
She got up abruptly, went over to the table, picked up a cigarette and stood there a long time with it hanging unlighted out of the corner of her mouth.
“Why do you think I’m not over at that goddam joint checking hats?” she said quietly, without looking up. “Don’t you suppose the minute Slim Maggio tells enough people confidentially to cover up, and it starts slopping over, everybody’ll be on my neck trying to get the low down?”
Her voice rose hysterically.
“Do you think I want them all feeling sorry for me because he gave me the run-around? Don’t you suppose I’ve got my pride, the same as Judy Bonner? I was crazy about him, sure—but that doesn’t keep me from knowing he was nothing but a lousy, gold-digging bastard.—Oh, God, I wish I was dead!”
“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!” I thought. “How I wish Judy would come!”
I thought I really couldn’t sit there quietly another minute. But I did. Vicki was pacing the floor, back and forth, looking like a lion tamer in a cage, thwacking her black bootleg with her crop, wailing over and over that she wished she was dead. I couldn’t very well join her pacing, but I presently began to concur in her wish. “I can’t,” I thought, “stand this much longer without going mad.”
And then came relief—or I mistakingly thought it was, not knowing Reno. Somebody knocked on the door. I called out, “Come in,” and a girl I hadn’t seen before walked in. She was well dressed, in ordinary street clothes, with a smart black silk crownless turban on her light hair, and a white tailored sports dress, and she carried a long green cigarette holder in her hand. She had a strange face, without animation of any kind.
“Where’s Judy?” she asked dully, looking around the room.
“Out at the Bar B. W.,” Vicki said.
“Oh.”
The girl looked around again, and flopped down on the small of her back in a cushioned chair. She stuck her feet out in front of her.
“This is Mrs. Latham,” Vicki said.
The girl nodded. She sat staring in front of her. Finally she said, “I wouldn’t care if she just didn’t read his letters in front of me every morning, and call him up when I’m taking a bath, so I have to hear everything she says to him. I don’t mind the rest of it. But I don’t think that’s fair.”
I glanced at Vicki. I had the curious feeling that it was visiting day at the lunatic asylum.
“Then what did you ever come out here with her in the first place for, you big klunk?” Vicki said.
She collapsed on her stomach on the sofa, rolling her head back and forth in the down cushions, trying, I knew, to ease the ache in her own foggy brain. It was the first I saw of the strange Reno phenomenon that no matter how miserable and unhappy anybody is, she can always take time out to listen to anybody else’s woes, and genuinely too. I’m sure there’s no other place in the world where there’s so much disinterested emotion so freely given . . . or so much time wasted listening to broken tales of mismanaged lives.
“You might have known how it would be,” Vicki said, without raising her head.
“I thought it wouldn’t look so bad at home if everybody thought I was all for her marrying him,” the girl said dully. “He works in a bank, and I didn’t want anybody to think I was just being kicked out. He’s swell, really. I didn’t want it to be hard on him at the bank. And her husband’s a nice guy too. He teaches in high school. He thought it would look better if we came out the same time—like nobody was getting hurt, just reshuffling the cards. And I don’t care, really, I don’t. It’s just I wish she didn’t read those long special delivery letters every morning while I’m trying to eat breakfast.”
She continued staring ahead of her.
“No,” Vicki said. “It’s hard enough to get down anyway.”
“I’m glad there weren’t any kids,” the girl said. She lighted another cigarette from the end of the one in her holder, and looked around at me.
“Have you got any children?”
“Two,” I said.
“With the father, I suppose.”
She got up.
“Well, tell Judy I want her to come to our party tomorrow. We go to court at eleven. You come too. I’m going to get so drunk I won’t wake up till after she’s married him.—Down in the bar, at half-past eleven,” she added.
She picked up her purse.
“I’m glad Judy and Dex are going to get married the same day she gets her decree. She won’t have such an empty feeling, still having a man’s name and it not meaning anything. That’ll seem funny. Well, good-bye. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She wandered out.
“I wish Judy would come!” I said.
I got up abruptly and went to the window. The snivelling tragedy of the girl who’d just strolled out, torturing herself to save the faces of a wretched bank clerk and a high school teacher in a small town somewhere back East seemed incredibly puny, and futile, and unreal, and brutal, as I raised my eyes to the vast luminous star-studded night. Somewhere out under it was Judy, bearing a heart-breaking burden, worse than this one, and bearing it bravely. I opened my lips to breathe some sort of anguished prayer for her. No prayer came . . . only the old quatrain from Omar:
Oh that inverted Bowl we call the sky,
Whereunder, crawling, cooped, we live and die.
Lift not your hands to it for help,
For it as impotently rolls as you and I.
And just then there was a knock at the door. I turned back into the room. Vicki had raised her head and shouted “Come in!” And the door opened, and in came Colonel Primrose.
8
He looked at me, then at Vicki, and the most extraordinary expression of relief came over his face. He rubbed his hands together, smiling.
Vicki got up instantly and retrieved her white hat and riding crop. “I’ll be going,” she said airily. “See you later.”
She turned at the door and gave Colonel Primrose a slightly intoxicated smile, put on her hat, gave it a debonair pat that I knew she was far from feeling, and sauntered out.
Colonel Primrose looked at me.
“That’s Vicki,” I said. “The hat check girl at the River House.”
“Oh,” he said. His face clouded abruptly. “I thought it was your niece. I . . . also hoped it was.”
For a moment I didn’t understand. Then I thought of Vicki’s full blue-black tresses, and came sharply back to the thing I’d wandered away from, listening to Vicki and the bank clerk’s wife. My heart sank. Those bright hairs were still in the pocket of my riding shirt. I tried not to glance at my door.
