Reno Rendezvous, page 8
“I know it—I heard it, this evening, at a bar in Carson City,” Judy said. “And I heard that man say he was . . . killed . . . with that.”
“—But you didn’t kill him, did you, miss?”
We all started violently, even Colonel Primrose. Judy looked up at Sergeant Buck, who had cast that minor thunderbolt, her jaw tightening, her eyes turning into little pools of brimstone.
“No!” she said. “But I—”
Sergeant Buck interposed instantly. “I wouldn’t talk like that if I was you, miss,” he said, harshly. And yet it had a tone of quite fatherly remonstrance—if anything coming out of one side of that grim mouth could properly be said to be paternal.
Judy looked at him, her red mouth going down dangerously at the corners. Colonel Primrose tapped the table, and Mr. Hogan looked surprised and definitely annoyed . . . and I, I’m afraid, looked not unlike the cat that had just swallowed the canary. Sergeant Buck and I were at long last allies. I didn’t realize that we had been—in a sort of backhand alignment—since morning, before Judy ever entered the picture.
“How long have you known Mr. Cromwell, Mrs. Bonner?” Colonel Primrose asked.
“About a year,” Judy said quietly.
“What can you tell us about him? We’re simply trying to fill out a background for him—to find out, perhaps, who his enemies were.”
Judy was silent a moment, her gaze shifting to a point on the rug by the fireplace.
“I met him at a cocktail party in New York, at some friends’, and then a lot later. He came from Milwaukee—his father’s a banker there. His mother died when he was sixteen and sort of . . . sort of threw him on his own—he didn’t get along with his father.”
“You came out here together?”
The color mounted in Judy’s face.
“Not . . . exactly,” she said, without shifting her gaze.
“What do you mean, ‘not exactly,’ Mrs. Bonner?” Hogan asked sharply. Colonel Primrose stood looking at her, pointedly not having asked the question himself, I thought.
Judy got abruptly to her feet . . . and as she did so, the cuff of her riding shirt caught on the twisted hook of the bloodstained candle pick, and sent it flying off the table, up into the air and onto the floor. It caught and stuck, its sharp pointed tip buried in the rug, a mute and ghastly reconstruction, in a sense, of the crime, and almost an accusation.
She recoiled a step against a chair and stood staring down at it, one hand against her open mouth, her face livid with horror.
“Judy!” I cried. “Stop it! Stop it!”
I caught her arm and pushed her down into the chair, and turned on Mr. Hogan.
“Are you trying to drive the girl crazy?” I demanded. “Can’t you leave her until morning, or at least till her lawyer gets here?”
It was Colonel Primrose who spoke. “I think we can, Mrs. Latham.”
Mr. Hogan bent down and pulled the candle pick out of the floor, covering it first with his handkerchief, and wrapped it in the stained riding shirt again. He looked grim and undecided as he glanced appraisingly at the shaking child in the chair, her hands covering her face. I had the sudden awful impression that up to that time he’d been wondering whether it was possible for anyone so fragile and delicate as Judy to drive a rude hand-wrought piece of iron into a man’s throat . . . and that now he had no longer any doubt.
“I’ll have to ask you not to let her go out again this evening, Mrs. Latham,” he said. “Try to have her get some rest. Tomorrow’ll be a hard day.”
I locked the door when they’d gone and came back to the table. The sheaf of slips the desk clerk had given me were lying in a heap, pushed aside under an ash tray in the confusion. I picked them up, glad to have something off the subject but not as banal as the weather to talk about. I handed them to Judy, still dazed, slumped down in the chair where I’d pushed her.
“These are yours,” I said.
She looked at them, dully at first. Then gradually she came to life, like a tulip bud opening out under the camera on the motion-picture screen. She made a sudden leap for the telephone, and stopped just as her hand touched it, her face and body completely transformed. She turned back to me slowly.
“If I phone, they’ll be listening in, won’t they?” she whispered urgently.
“I’m afraid they might,” I said. “And furthermore the gentleman’s gone. He checked out for the late afternoon plane.”
She stared at me, her lips parting stupidly, her eyes going dull again. The sheaf of slips fluttered to the floor. She stood perfectly motionless for a long time, then raised one hand to her forehead and rubbed back her hair.
“I’d like to . . . be by myself a little while, Grace,” she whispered, her voice scarcely audible. “But don’t go very far away, will you?”
“No, darling,” I answered. I went to my door and turned back.
“Judy—this is going to be in the papers in the morning,” I said, in a matter-of-fact and practical fashion that I was far from feeling. “I’d like to cable your parents, just to reassure them. Do you mind?”
For a moment I thought she hadn’t heard me. After a bit she gave me a baffling twisted little smile.
“I’m afraid you can’t, Grace. Because there isn’t . . . anything . . . anything reassuring to tell them.”
“Okay, then,” I said, trying desperately to sound casual. “I’ll wait till there is.”
I opened my door. “I’m going down to the bar to get a sandwich. I’ll be back in ten minutes, if you want me.”
She nodded. I closed the door behind me, reflecting suddenly that I was fast getting acclimated. I could hear the bell boy saying, “if you want Mrs. Latham just look in the bar.”
10
The bar of the Hotel Washoe looked at the moment more like a morgue than a hot spot. The gaming tables were empty, the dealers clicking their chips and piles of silver dollars in vain. The bartenders in their white coats were in one dismal little huddle, the musicians in another. A few bewildered newcomers in Eastern clothes were in one corner with the hotel hostess, an Eastern girl in a red evening dress, treating them to their first—and last—drink on the house, and being determinedly and unconvincingly cheerful.
At the table at the end of the bar I saw Kaye Gorman, Whitey and Joe Lucas—Cowboy Joe—all more or less plastered, or pretending they were, with two other men and a couple of girls in Western clothes that I didn’t know.
I signalled Eddie the waiter. “Get me a sandwich—anything but chicken salad—and a pot of coffee, over in a corner. I want to telephone.”
He nodded.
“Are there any detectives in here now?”
He shook his head.
“Not unless it’s that guy in the corner by the dollar machine,” he whispered.
I glanced past him at the end of the line of slot machines—one-armed pickpockets, the bus boy at the Town House calls them—and saw, with a start, my admirer the dashing Mr. Steve Ewing. He was looking at me, smiling.
“I don’t know for sure who he is,” Eddie said.
I nodded. “Where’s the phone?”
I know now, because a friend of mine who’s a proprietor of a night club and gambling house told me, that phone booths and washrooms and cash desks are always placed so you have to pass the Scylla of the bar and the Charybdis of the gambling tables to get to them—in the hope that you can’t withstand a dual assault on your lower nature. I never have to ask directions any more, but then I didn’t know.
Eddie nodded toward the apex between the bar and the crap game, beside the musicians’ dais, and I went along past the slowly whirling roulette wheel and the stacks of silver dollars at the twenty-one table, unconscious of both of them, and took down the phone in the booth. I was entirely absorbed in the necessity of talking to Clem Bonner. I hadn’t dared phone from my own room. At a public phone the girl at the switchboard wouldn’t recognize my voice, and I had Clem’s number so I didn’t have to use Judy’s name for her to recognize.
I got long distance, and gave his number, Ashland 4-8180, and waited, listening to the fascinating relay race of voices gathering distance in to me as a fisherman gathers in his line, until I had New York and Clem’s apartment in the narrow booth there in Reno . . . with the impassive presence of the butler blocking me again.
“Listen!” I said. “I’ve got to speak to Mr. Clem!” I didn’t dare say Bonner. “Will you tell him it’s his wife’s aunt, Mrs. Latham, and I simply must speak to him. It’s absolutely imperative!”
“I’m sorry, madam,” the voice said. “Mr. Bonner has given orders that he is not to be disturbed by anyone whatsoever.”
“Will you go and tell him what I’m saying to you?” I demanded, as urgently as I could. “Tell him that it’s terribly important.—He’s in, isn’t he?”
I looked at my watch. It would be one o’clock in New York.
“Well, I presume so, madam.” The reply was stiff and slightly pained. “He was a short time ago, at any rate.”
“Then go and tell him at once,” I said.
I could hear the door slam, and after an interminable time the butler’s voice again, still more stiff and pained. “Mr. Bonner begs to be excused, madam. He does not wish to be involved in any controversy with any member of the family. Good-bye, madam.”
I sat staring into the phone with a curious sense of receding space and hopelessness and defeat. Then I was simply angry. “Involved in a controversy” indeed, I thought furiously. I took down the phone again. But when the operator spoke I changed my mind and hung up again. There was no use phoning Judy’s father. It would take him over a week to get to Reno, and there wasn’t anything that I could say to him.
The phone clicked, and I took down the receiver. The operator said, “Shall I charge that call to your room, Mrs. Latham?”
“Yes,” I said. I might have saved myself the trouble of coming down.
I went back into the bar. Eddie was putting a cloth on a little table in the corner. I sat down to wait for my sandwich. The table with Kaye Gorman and Whitey and Cowboy Joe and the rest of them was to my left at the end of the bar. I could hear Kaye Gorman’s baby voice: “You’d better sober up, Whitey, you’ve got a long evening ahead of you,” and his semi-belligerent reply, and I put my head in my hands, trying not to listen to their babble.
And suddenly it occurred to me . . . as a last resort . . . I got up and walked across to their table.
They all looked distinctly embarrassed and ill at ease. Whitey, who was as drunk as I’ve ever seen anybody still navigating under his own steam, tried to get up, and collapsed back in his chair.
“Hello, Miz’ Latham,” he said. “Told you was going to clear out of here, didn’ I? Didn’ I? Well, going do it. Going to clear out right now.”
He made another attempt to get up.
“I’m through. You don’ believe me, but I’m through.”
“Sit down, Whitey,” Kaye Gorman said.
“Aw right, I’ll sit down. What’ll you have drink, Miz’ Latham?”
“Nothing, thanks,” I said. “I just wanted to speak to you, Mrs. Gorman.”
She looked at me.
“All right. Shoot.”
“Privately?” I asked.
“Nothing private in Reno,” Whitey mumbled. “Nothing sacred. Nothing holy. I’m going clear out right now.”
Cowboy Joe grinned at me. “You better wait till the mo’nin’, Whitey,” he drawled.
Whitey picked up his glass. “Aw right. Clear out in the morning.”
Kaye Gorman, still looking steadily at me, hesitated. Then she got up, and we moved to the corner of the bar. She stood, one foot on the rail, her elbow on the chromium edge, and said “Well?”
“I want Clem Bonner to know what’s happened out here,” I said.
The skin around her eyes contracted. She blew two long thin ribbons of cigarette smoke through her nose.
“So what?” she asked.
“I can’t get him on the phone,” I said. “Will you call him, and let me talk to him?”
She gave me a long minute’s gaze through black lowered lashes, her mouth twisting slowly into a cold and unbelievably impersonal smile.
“The answer, Mrs. Latham,” she said coolly, “is no.”
She blew another stream of smoke past my face and said, “I’m not interested in Judith Bonner. She made her bed, and let her lie in it.”
A slow familiar voice at my shoulder brought Kaye Gorman sharply around. “Oh, is that so!” it said.
My friend Vicki from the River House, less sober even than when I’d seen her last, was standing there, steadying herself on the arm of a new man.—It seemed to me I never saw the same person twice in Reno.
“Well, listen, Kaye,” she said. “That’s the screwiest goddam advice you ever gave anybody, see? What’d she do if she was a chambermaid? What would any of us do? There wouldn’t be any Reno if we started sleeping in our own beds. There—”
Cowboy Joe came lounging over. “Shut up, Vicki,—you’re drunk,” he said good-naturedly. He pushed her and her friend along the bar. “Let’s have a drink—on the house. Eddie, what do you say?”
Kaye Gorman stood stock still, her face chalk-white, her baby blue eyes blistering.
“Anyway—I’m not calling up Clem for your niece, Mrs. Latham,” she said, with suppressed venom. “I’ve had enough of her—already. Let her call Clem herself, if she wants him . . . or if she can get him.”
She turned on her heel and went along the bar to Joe and Vicki and the other man. “It’s my turn to buy drinks,” I heard her say. “What’ll it be, Vicki?”
“Scotch, if I don’t have to lie in it,” I heard Vicki say, with her throaty rippling laugh.
I didn’t hear any more. I went back to my table. It was stupid of me, of course, to ask her, and still . . . I shrugged my shoulders. It was a tactical error, I suppose. If you’re taking another woman’s husband, you don’t want him helping her—even out of murder.
After a little Eddie brought my sandwich. He put it down. I nodded without speaking, and then, because he didn’t go away, I glanced up. He was looking down at me, his old-young face an almost ludicrous caricature of distress and sympathy.
“You don’t honestly think she did it, Miz’ Latham, do you?” he asked anxiously.
“Of course not, Eddie,” I said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“That’s what it looks like to me too,” he said earnestly. “She couldn’t of done it. Not as crazy about him as she was, and always kidding about the other girls falling for him.”
He glanced furtively over his thin shoulder and bent down, pretending to be putting sugar in my coffee.
“It’s Mrs. Gorman I’d put my money on,” he whispered. “What’s she out here for? She got her divorce. What’s she come back for? Did you ever think of that?”
I put down my napkin and looked at him. He started nervously. “I don’t mean I think she—” he stammered.
“Of course not,” I said. “I just thought of something, that’s all.”
The bartender rapped on the bar just then, and he scurried off like a frightened rabbit. And I sat there, gazing absently at my sandwich, thinking. That “You don’t honestly think she did it, Mrs. Latham?” kept reeling around in my head? Did I, or didn’t I, I wondered? And what else could I think?
Her hairs clutched in his hand . . . the bloodstained weapon hidden, wrapped in her riding shirt, in her soiled clothes hamper . . . his philandering . . . their quarrel at three in the morning in her room—what else was there to think?
Eddie’s “It’s Mrs. Gorman I’d put my money on” would be the plainest kind of what they call wishful thinking. But I wasn’t above it—not now when the idea was there, creeping insidiously in my mind. Why was she there? She had her divorce. She was a widow, and didn’t need another. Clem was in New York, Dex Cromwell hadn’t known she was coming. I was sure of that in spite of Judy’s passionate accusation: “You just want to humiliate me—you knew she was coming!” But why had she come?
It was just hoping against hope for Judy. That’s all I was doing, and I knew it.
I was aware then that somebody was standing beside my table there. I looked up. It was Mr. Steve Ewing, smiling his unpleasantly significant smile down at me.
“Do you mind?” he said, pulling up a chair, and before I could say “Yes, I do—intensely,” he was in it . . . not across from me but at my left, his back to the room, leaning both elbows on the table in the most clubby fashion.
“You know, I owe you an apology. I thought you were a divorcée, yesterday. But you aren’t, you’re a widow, aren’t you?”
“You know,” I said, “I would be awfully glad if you would go somewhere else. And if you don’t, I’ll have to.”
The smile wiped off his face slowly, leaving it rather frightening, I was aware to my astonishment.
“I think you’ll change your mind about that, Mrs. Latham, if you’ll listen to me a minute,” he said. He was looking at me with another smile then, a different one, and his eyes narrowed. I don’t know how I knew it, because it was the first time I’d ever come up against it; but I did know that this was not funny, or . . . or the sort of thing that my kind of people knew about. It was low, and soulless—the sort of thing that goes on in slimy underground places where there’s ignorance and filth, and where decent things aren’t known. I was frightened—not for myself, but for Judy, slim and lovely and ignorant, too, in her own way . . . but ignorant of the things that this man knew, and that parts of Reno, and New York and Paris and the whole world, away from the other safe sheltered parts, knew.
“What is it?” I said quietly.
He smiled again.
“I thought you’d be sensible,” he said.
I looked at my arms. I’d thought the gooseflesh must be visible all over them, but it wasn’t—it was only on my heart.
“I do a little . . . amateur photography, from time to time, Mrs. Latham,” he said slowly, looking straight into my eyes.
