Black Money

24

I drove slowly up the pass road which was the shortest route between Montevista and the city, Sylvester kept looking back into the valley where we had left Ginny. The rooftops were half submerged among the trees like flotsam in a turbulent green flood. I said: “Shouldn’t she be in the hospital, or at least have a nurse?”

“I’ll see about that later, when I’ve cleaned up my work at the clinic.”

“Do you think she’ll be all right?”

Sylvester was slow in answering. “She’s a durable girl. Of course she’s had lousy luck, compounded by bad judgement. She should have married Peter as she was supposed to. She would have been safe with him, at least. Maybe now she will.”

“Maybe. You seem fond of the girl.”

“As fond as I dare be.”

“What does that mean, doctor?”

“Just what I said. She’s a beautiful kid and she trusts me. You make everything sound like an accusation.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then listen to yourself. You’ll see what I mean.”

“You may be right.”

I wanted him to keep talking. After a moment, I said: “You knew Roy Fablon. Was he the kind of a man who would try to use his daughter to pay off gambling losses?”

“Why ask me?”

“Ginny seems to think he was.”

“I didn’t gather that from the conversation. At worst, Roy may have been using her, or trying to, to make Spillman more lenient. You don’t know how desperate a man can get when a gorilla like Spillman has you by the–” He suppressed the end of the sentence. “I do.”

“What you say adds up to an affirmative answer. Fablon was the kind of man who would try to use his daughter.”

“He may have toyed around with the idea. But he’d never have gone through with it.”

“He didn’t, anyway. He didn’t have a chance to. Say he made an offer to Spillman and then withdrew it. A blowtop like Spillman might very easily have killed him.”

“It works just as well the other way,” Sylvester said. “Better, if you know the background situation. Put a man like Roy in a moral vise like that, and he’s liable to kill himself. Which is what happened. I checked back with Dr. Wills this morning, incidentally – he’s the deputy coroner who performed the autopsy on Roy. He found definite evidence, chemical evidence that Roy drowned himself in the ocean.”

“Or was drowned.”

“There are cases of murder by drowning,” Sylvester said. “But I never heard of one committed by a sick man in the sea at night.”

“Spillman was and is in a position to have these things done for him.”

“He had no motive.”

“We’ve just been talking about one possible motive. A more obvious one was that Fablon owed him thirty thousand dollars and he couldn’t pay. Spillman wouldn’t take it lightly. You’re a witness to that.”

Sylvester moved restlessly in the seat. “Marietta really put a bee in your bonnet. She was cracked on the subject of Spillman.”

“Did she talk to you about him recently?”

“Yesterday of lunch, when you barged in.”

“You must take her seriously or you wouldn’t have checked with Dr. Wills today.”

“Check with Wills yourself. He’ll tell you the same thing.”

We had reached the low summit of the pass. In a sloping field to my left an old palomino stallion wandered in the sunlight, white-maned, like a survivor.

I adjusted my windshield visor against the light as we started down the hill. The city below resembled a maze, put together by an inspired child: it looked both intricate and homemade. Beyond it lay the changing blue mystery of the sea.

I dropped Sylvester off in front of his clinic and crossed the street to Mercy Hospital. The deputy coroner had his office and laboratory in the basement, next to the hospital morgue.

Dr. Wills was a small thin man with a dedicated-scientist look, intensified by steel-rimmed glasses. He handled himself as if his hands, his fingers, even his eyes and mouth were technical instruments, useful but not alive; and the real Dr. Wills sat hidden in his skull directing their operations.

He didn’t even blink when I told him that there had been another killing.

“It’s getting a little thick,” was all he said.

“Have you done your P.M. on Mrs. Fablon?”

“Not a complete one. It hardly seemed necessary. The bullet nicked her aorta, and that was it.”

He gestured toward an inner door.

“What kind of bullet?”

“It looks like a .38. It came through in fair condition, and should be good for comparison if we ever find the gun.”

“May I see it?”

“I’ve already turned it over to Inspector Olsen.”

“Tell him it should be compared with the slug that killed Martel.”

Wills gave me a quizzical look. “Why don’t you tell him yourself?”

“He’ll like it better if he hears it from you. I also think he should reopen the Roy Fablon case.”

“I disagree about that,” Wills said crisply. “A murder, or two murders, in the present, don’t change a suicide in the past.”

“Are you quite certain it was a suicide?”

“Quite. I had occasion to look over my notes only this morning. There’s no question that Fablon committed suicide by drowning. The external contusions were almost certainly inflicted after death. In any case they wouldn’t have been sufficient to cause death.”

“I gather he took quite a beating.”

“Bodies do in these waters. But there’s no doubt he was a suicide. In addition to the physical evidence, he threatened suicide in the presence of his wife and daughter.”

“So I’ve been told.”

The thought of it, coming on top of my talks with Sylvester and Ginny, was depressing. The present couldn’t alter the past, as Wills had said, but it could make you painfully aware of its mysteries and meanings.

Wills misinterpreted my silence: “If you doubt my word, you can look up the record of the coroner’s inquest.”

“I don’t doubt you’re giving me an accurate report, doctor. Who gave the testimony about the suicide threat?”

“Fablon’s wife. You can’t question that.”

“You can question anything human.”

The ambiguities of last night’s conversation with Marietta still teetered in my mind. “I understand that before the inquest she claimed her husband was murdered.”

“Perhaps she did. The physical evidence must have persuaded her otherwise. At the inquest she came out strongly for the idea of suicide.”

“What was the physical evidence you referred to?”

“The chemical content of the blood taken from the heart. It proved conclusively that he was drowned.”

“He could have been knocked out and drowned in a bathtub. It’s been done.”

“Not in this case.”

Dr. Wills answered smoothly and rapidly, like a well-programmed computer. “The chloride content of the blood in the left ventricle was over twenty-five percent above normal. The magnesium content was greatly increased, as compared with the right ventricle. Those two indicators taken together prove that Fablon drowned in ocean water.”

“And there’s no doubt that the body was Fablon’s?”

“None whatever. His wife identified it, in my presence.”

Wills adjusted his glasses and looked at me through them diagnostically, as if he suspected that I had an obsession. “Frankly I think you’re making a mistake in trying to connect what happened to him with– this.”

He gestured again toward the wall on the other side of which Marietta lay in her refrigerated drawer.

Perhaps I should have stayed and argued with Wills. He was an honest man. But the place and its basement chill were getting me down. The cement walls and high small windows made it resemble a cell in an old-fashioned jail.

I got out of there. Before I left the hospital I found a telephone booth and made a long-distance call to Professor Allan Bosch of Los Angeles State College. He was in his office and answered the phone himself.

“This is Lew Archer. You don’t know my name–”

He cut in: “On the contrary, Mr. Archer, your name was mentioned to me within the past hour.”

“You’ve heard from Tappinger then.”

“He just left here. I gave him as full a report as I could on Pedro Domingo.”

“Pedro Domingo?”

“That’s the name Cervantes used when he was my student. I believe it’s his true name, and I know for a fact that he’s a native of Panama. Those are the points at issue, aren’t they?”

“There are others. If I could talk to you in person–” His rapid young voice cut in on me again. “I’m jammed at the moment – Professor Tappinger’s visit did nothing for my schedule. Why don’t you get the facts from him and if there’s anything else you need to know you can get in touch with me later?”

“I’ll do that. In the meantime there’s something you ought to know, Professor. Your former student was shot dead in Brentwood this afternoon.”

“Pedro was shot?”

“He was murdered. Which means that his identity is something more than an academic question. You better get in touch with Captain Perlberg of Homicide.”

“Perhaps I had better,” he said slowly, and hung up.

I checked with my answering service in Hollywood. Ralph Christman had phoned from Washington and dictated a message. The operator read it to me over the line: “Colonel Plimsoll identifies mustached waiter in photograph as South or Central American diplomat named Domingo, he thinks. Do I query the embassies?”

I asked the operator to call Christman for me and tell him to try the embassies, especially the Panamanian one.

Past and present were coming together. I had a moment of claustrophobia in the phone booth, as if I was caught between converging walls.