Rose's Last Summer [= The Lively Corpse]

22

No one believed her, but Lora Dalloway stuck to her story for the rest of the afternoon. At five-thirty she was served a light supper in the cell adjoining Greer’s office, which was reserved for special prisoners. Greer had a pot of coffee and a canvas chair brought in for himself. He had questioned Lora at the airport, in the car, in his office, and he thought this rather drastic change of atmosphere might affect her veracity.

It didn’t. She seemed quite at ease in the cell, ate with good appetite, and repeated her version of the facts.

No, she did not know where Mrs. Goodfield was or why or how she had left. She had bought the ether in a fit of despondency but had changed her mind when the idea occurred to her of borrowing money from old Mrs. Goodfield so she could leave town.

“What kind of jam were you in?” Greer asked.

“Oh, you know, personal troubles.”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“Well, in the first place there was Ortega breathing down my neck, wanting to get married and start raising children. Children, yet. Makes me sick to think of it. Ortega’s all right, he has a nice build, but he’s just a boy. Anyway he was getting hard to handle. I thought it was the strategic moment to disappear. You can’t always trust these Mexicans — they don’t put as much value on human life as we do.”

Even though he thought he was beginning to understand Lora, Greer was startled by the inconsistency of her mind. She seemed to consider it logical to run away from Ortega’s possible violence, yet at the same time plan violence against herself; to speak of the value of human life and yet to ignore its value. Her words and her emotions had little connection. They flowed separately and in opposite directions, and only occasionally did they touch as they had during the meeting with her father in the airport waiting room.

He said, “Ortega’s a nice boy. I think you could have handled him all right. He’s very fond of you.”

“He adores me,” Lora said sharply. “So what? I hate being adored. I hate that feeling of responsibility. It makes me want to hit out at people.”

And at yourself, Greer thought. But he didn’t say it. Instead, he sipped at his coffee and waited for her to continue.

“The second reason was my father. Naturally I knew he was in town, but I had no idea he was so close on my trail until yesterday. I looked out of the window and there he was in the garden talking to Ortega. I was furious. All my life he’s been doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“Hovering over me, treating me as if I were a four- year-old, trying to make me stay home and live his kind of life. I can’t stand his kind of life. I need excitement, change, fun.”

“Is that your idea of fun and excitement, taking a job as an ordinary servant?”

“It wasn’t ordinary. And yes, it was fun, in a way, watching Ethel swallow that milady stuff and Willett inflate like a balloon when I called him sir. I got some laughs out of it. Talk about a pair of dimwits, those two really deserve a prize.”

Greer glanced pointedly at the barred window. “Your own mammoth intellect has managed to land you in jail.”

“It will get me out.”

“You’re confident.”

“Just wait until Willett comes. He’ll explain, arrange the necessary bail and so on. He is coming? You gave him my message?”

“Yes.”

She leaned forward eagerly, like a child about to hear a favorite story. “What did you tell him?”

“What you asked me to — that you wanted to see him and that your real name was Lora Dalloway and you were Rose’s daughter.”

“How did he react?”

“He seemed startled, genuinely startled.”

“Oh, it was genuine, all right,” she said, smiling, pleased with herself. “He had no idea who I was. I played my role to the hilt.”

“Beyond the hilt.”

“I don’t consider you an authority on acting.”

“You don’t have to be an authority to recognize schmalz,” Greer said. “You’re like your mother in that respect. I saw one of her old movies on TV last week — she couldn’t ask the time of day without flinging herself all over the screen.”

“That’s not true. My mother was a wonderful actress. I could have been, too, if I’d had any chance.”

“That’s the story of your life, is it? You never had any chances.”

“Not real ones. Dalloway hemmed me in.”

“So you decided to come west and find your mother. Where did you go first?”

“I’ve told you all this.”

“Tell me again.”

“I landed in L.A. I was broke, so I took a job for a couple of weeks to earn some money for clothes. I’d left most of my clothes behind and I didn’t want to meet my mother looking like a bum. I thought — I was under the impression that she was quite wealthy.”

“You must have had a shock.”

“I did. That awful boarding house — that slatternly Mrs. Cushman — I could hardly believe it. And mother looked terrible, old and haggard and half-starved.”

“Was she glad to see you?”

“Glad enough. I didn’t expect her to dissolve with joy. We got along all right, not as mother and daughter but as two people with something in common — we both needed money.”

“You only paid one visit to the boarding house?”

“Just one — the first. After that we met other places, in cafés or on the breakwater.”

“Why?”

“Rose wasn’t keen on acknowledging me as her long-lost daughter; it put her in too bad a light. And frankly, I wasn’t very keen on being acknowledged. I kept on using the name Ada Murphy. It’s such an earthy, ugly name, no one would ever think it wasn’t real.”

“What did you and your mother talk about when you met?”

“Oh, things in general,” she said with a vague wave of one hand.

“Nothing in particular?”

“No.”

“She didn’t tell you about a job she was offered?”

“No.”

“She was apparently on her way to start that job when she died. In fact, she may have decided to stop in at the Goodfields’ to say goodbye to you.”

Lora blinked. “Yes, I’ve thought of that. It seems likely. She knew where I was working.”

“Did she know why you were working there?”

“Why? Why does anyone work? For beans and coffee.”

“You deliberately planted yourself in the Goodfield house. Don’t deny it. We have the evidence of Ethel Goodfield and Miss Raffin of Personal Services. Why go through all that fancy footwork to land a mediocre job?”

“I heard that the Goodfields wanted someone to help look after the old lady.”

“Where did you hear it?”

“From Ortega. I met him down on the beach one day surf-fishing. We got to talking about the new family who’d just moved into the Pearce estate where he worked.”

“And Ortega told you all about the Goodfields and how they needed a companion for Mrs. Goodfield?”

“That’s right.”

“It’s not right at all,” Greer said. “It’s not even close. Neither Willett nor Ethel Goodfield had any real contact with Ortega until after Rose’s death. He came certain days a week and did his work. His salary was included in the rent the Goodfields paid; they had no personal contact with him or interest in him.”

“He knew all about them anyway.”

“You’re going to stick to that story?”

“Like glue.” She had finished eating her supper. She put the tin tray on the floor and wiped her mouth with a handkerchief. “By the way, where’s my father?”

“He’s being held for questioning.”

“That’s absurd. Not that I care about him, but he had nothing to do with that money. I’ve explained all that.”

“Explain it again.”

“Very well, if you insist. I went to the Goodfields’ house around three in the morning. I’m not sure about the time — I’d bummed around the town all night, went to a movie and walked around and had a few drinks. The drinks made me feel better, more hopeful. I wasn’t so keen on killing myself. I’m not really the suicidal type. I get depressed but I bounce right back again.”

“In fact, you bounced right over to the Goodfields’.”

“Yes, to borrow money from Olive Goodfield. I knew she didn’t have much, if any, but I was certain that there was cash somewhere in the house. I’d heard Willett talking to Jack over the phone about the loan Jack wanted, and after the phone call Willett went to the bank. I put two and two together and got three thousand dollars.”

“You intended to borrow it all?”

“I thought I’d try to. After all, she and I were quite close, closer than anyone realizes. The only trouble was that when I got there she was gone. I’d walked three whole miles in the middle of the night for nothing. My feet hurt and my head ached and I was cold and hungry. It’s funny how the mind can function brilliantly sometimes when the body is all worn out.”

“Vice versa is even funnier,” Greer said.

“What I had was a marvelous idea. You just don’t appreciate it because it wasn’t strictly legal.”

“It wasn’t even remotely legal. You faked a kidnapping.”

“What else could I do?”

Greer realized the futility of trying to answer her. Like her mother, Lora had a psychopathic streak in her nature that made moral self-judgments impossible. What she thought was brilliant, what she did was right. Later on, when the brilliance faded and the rightness turned wrong, she could admit her mistakes. But at the time of action her course always seemed inevitable; she steered straight for her objective whether it was a harbor or a floating mine.

“I still had the bottle of ether in my purse,” Lora went on. “It didn’t take me long to arrange the room, the windows and the piece of silk from her nightgown caught on the broken glass. At the last moment I opened the ether and sprinkled it around the bed. Then I went downstairs and out the back door to the garage. I carried the extension ladder around to the sundeck outside Mrs. Goodfield’s bedroom windows.”

She gave Greer a bright wasn’t-I-clever glance. Greer turned away, feeling a cold dislike flowing like ice water through his veins. “Did you have any concern about Mrs. Goodfield, what had happened to her?”

“Why should I? If she wanted to run out, it was her own business, not mine. I merely took advantage of it.”

“I see.”

“I went back to town and checked in at some crummy hotel for a couple of hours’ sleep. I gave the night clerk a story about having a quarrel with my husband and walking out, and he wasn’t suspicious. Shortly before seven I got up and phoned Ethel from a pay phone in a restaurant. Everything went smoothly as I planned. It wasn’t until after I’d picked up the ransom money that I began to get nervous. I realized that Ethel couldn’t keep her mouth shut, and that every cop in town would be looking for me. As soon as the stores opened up I bought a pair of sunglasses. Then I saw this blonde wig on a dummy in a beauty parlor window. I gave the proprietor a story about wanting to borrow it to play a gag on my husband. He swallowed it. It’s amazing how unsuspicious people are when you pretend to confide in them.

“I felt a lot safer with the wig and the sunglasses, but not safe enough. I still had the money on me, and I still had no way of getting far enough away from town. The police would be sure to be covering the ticket offices and I’m not the type to hitchhike. So I made my big mistake. I went to see my father.” She laughed, a throaty laugh that splashed across the cell and dripped venomously down the wall. “God, what a happy reunion that was. The old boy acted like a cross between Jesus Christ and Simon Legree.”

“He agreed to help you, though.”

“Oh sure. I played it with tears and violins and promises. Poor Dalloway is a sucker for all of them, especially the promises. He agreed to hold the money for me — I told him I won it on the horses — and to buy two plane tickets to New York. I was to meet him at the airport. I did. You know the rest.”

“Are you willing to sign a statement?”

“I told you before, no. I’m not signing anything.”

“Why not?”

“It’s very simple. I might want to change my story and then it wouldn’t look so good if there was a signed statement contradicting me.”

“It won’t look so good anyway.”

“Oh, I don’t know. If the case goes to court it will be your word against mine, and I can be pretty convincing.”

“You can be dangerously candid.”

This pleased her. “I’ve always been candid, like my mother.”

“I suppose you know that your mother was under treatment for some time at the Mental Health Clinic.”

“Nonsense. She wasn’t under treatment. Frank Clyde, a friend of hers, worked at the clinic. She went there for laughs.”

“You have,” Greer said, “more in common with your mother than you realize.”

“You didn’t even know her.”

“Frank has a file on her a mile long.”

“Files don’t live and breathe. You didn’t know Rose,” she repeated. “That wonderful vitality she had — nothing could get her down, nothing. She could pitch.”

“Towards the end she was pitching empty wine bottles into left field.”

“Nonsense.” Lora glanced at her wristwatch. “It’s time Willett was here. I can’t wait all night.”

“I’ll see if he’s arrived yet.”

“You’re very kind. You’re so kind it makes me wonder.”

“Wondering,” Greer said, “is good for a girl like you.”