Dream Town

Chapter 38

Archer had been to Anaheim once before. Back then he had viewed the place as vast orange and walnut groves with a small town hiding therein. His opinion hadn’t altered. He had changed into a dark suit, white shirt, and black tie, rented a green, two-door Buick Riviera in Bay Town, and driven to the address Connie had given him. As Dash had instructed, he’d stopped at a roadside venue to buy a small bundle of flowers.

Anne Bender lived in a modest tract house on the edge of an orange grove about a half mile outside the town limits. He could smell the oranges, and the pesticides clinging to their skin, from about a mile away, sort of like sugar and cyanide.

He pulled into the dirt driveway and got out. The screen door squeaked open and Anne Bender appeared there. She looked like a female version of her husband: gray, corpulent, and haggard, dressed all in somber black.

Archer introduced himself and she nodded slowly, her features full of sadness, grief, pain, anxiety, and fear, all the emotional elements rolled up into losing someone important. Her thin, gray hair was done up in a tight bun that pulled her brow wrinkles skyward. She had on a black sack dress with no ornamentation and low-heeled shoes that looked comfortable if not fancy.

With all the women Archer had recently met, in their mansions and penthouses and wearing the very best and costly garments, the comparison could not have been starker. But it seemed to Archer that Anne Bender, perhaps unlike all those other women, was living the very life that she had chosen for herself in the very way that she wanted to.

“Please, come in, Mr. Archer,” she said after firmly shaking his hand and taking the flowers from him, thanking him. “Mr. Dash told me you would be coming.”

“I’m sorry to be here at such a bad time,” he said.

“Cedric always told me there was a chance of something like this happening in his line of work. But he fought in the First World War, right after we were married. And he could’ve been killed then, too.” She looked up at Archer. “You like being a detective, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. There’s not much money in it, but there’re other things.”

“Oh, Lord, I know about the not-much-money thing, but we raised three children and had a good life together. Just not as long as I would have hoped.”

“Will your children be coming to the funeral?”

“My two sons are in the Army and can’t get leave to come. My daughter lives in Michigan and is about due to deliver her third child, so she can’t travel. I plan to get on a bus and go see her after the baby is born.” She looked around at a place that probably looked as foreign to her right now as another country would. “Nothing to keep me here now.”

“Again, I’m sorry. I didn’t know your husband, but I’ve spoken to people who did, and they all thought very highly of him.” He couldn’t bring himself to reveal that he had stumbled over her husband’s body at Lamb’s home.

“Mr. Dash said you’d drive me to the church and the gravesite. I don’t have a car.”

This momentarily jolted Archer, but then he thought, Of course you don’t have a car. You only had the Ford and no one knows where it is.

“I’ll take you wherever you need to go, ma’am.”

“Would you like some coffee or lemonade?” She wrinkled her nose and looked out the window at the nearby groves. “I don’t offer orange juice.”

“I’m fine. I’d just like to look through your husband’s office before we leave for the service.”

“All right. We don’t have to get going for about an hour or so. It’s not far.”

She led him down a short hallway. As Archer looked around, it occurred to him that the entire house could have fit inside the room where he had met Mallory Green. With all that, she was no happier than the woman walking slowly in front of him. And Green hadn’t lost her husband. At least not in the same way Anne Bender had lost hers.

“Here it is, Mr. Archer.” She handed him a key. “Cedric always kept it locked. He was a real stickler on that, confidentiality and such.”

Archer took the key. “I’m sure.”

He unlocked the door and went inside as he heard her shuffle back down the hall to do whatever it was a person did before going to their spouse’s funeral: wait, cry, aimlessly wander through old memories, cry some more.

He closed the door behind him and surveyed the small space. Desk, chair, row of pens and legal pads, a ream of typewriter paper, telephone, four metal file cabinets, and a small, squat iron safe. No window, so there wasn’t an orange or walnut grove in sight.

He searched the desk first and found little in the way of helpful information. There was no calendar, and he wondered why because every PI kept one. That could mean a little or a lot. He next methodically went through the file cabinets. They were alphabetized, which helped quite a lot since he simply jumped to the letter G for Green.

And that was when he ran into a big problem. There was no file for Mallory Green. It went from Harold Gompers right to Josephine Gustavo. He checked the entire cabinet just in case Bender had misfiled it. No Mallory Green. He went through the other cabinets. They all seemed to be in order but held no file for Green. And she had told him that she had used Bender before, after he’d been recommended by other wives with cheating hubbies. Yet not even that old file was here.

Archer sat down at the desk and checked the Wheeldex. All the entries were in neat block lettering, just like all the copies of client reports Archer had glanced at in the file cabinets. Mallory Green’s address and phone number weren’t in there, either. He looked at the blotter to see if it had some carryover marks or indentations from a letter or note Bender might have written, but nothing appeared that was relevant.

He squatted in front of the safe. It was a combination lock. He found Anne Bender sitting in the front room and asked if she knew the combination. She didn’t. He also asked her if she had been absent from the house at any time since her husband’s death.

“Yes, I had to go into town a few times. A friend took me.” She teared up. “And I had to go to the funeral home and bring the clothes for Cedric to be buried in.”

“Did you lock everything up before you left?”

“No, folks around here don’t lock their doors, Mr. Archer. It’s very safe, never had any trouble.”

Until now, thought Archer.

“The key you gave me to open your husband’s office. Where do you keep it?”

“Cedric kept it on a hook in the kitchen pantry.”

“Did you notice anything unusual when you came back from town those times, or when you got back from the funeral home?”

“Unusual? No.”

Archer had already seen that there were no other homes close by, so it was doubtful anyone would have seen someone go into her house.

“Did you go to the funeral home at night?”

“Yes, it was dark when they called and asked me to come in. Funny, though.”

“What?” said Archer sharply.

“Well, when I got there no one knew I was coming. Whoever had called I guess had gone home for the day.”

“Right, I’m sure.” Okay, so that’s how and when they did it. “One more thing — did your husband ever mention working for a Mallory Green?”

She shook her head. “But he never mentioned any of his clients, Mr. Archer. He was a real stickler on—”

“—confidentiality, yes, thanks. Last question: Did your husband keep a calendar?”

“Oh, yes, it should be on his desk.”

So someone did take the calendar. He wondered what else they had taken besides all the files on Mallory Green.

He went back to the office and looked around some more. The safe only had a few inches of separation between its back and the wall. He tried to lift it. The thing was bolted to the floor.

He noted scratches on the wall and something occurred to Archer. He quickly felt behind the safe, and his hand brushed against something hard. It was the back of the safe. As he touched it again, it fell against the wall. Someone had managed to shear off the metal backing. He slid his hand into the narrow opening and felt around. Nothing. He did more probing and all he touched was the felt liner inside the safe. They probably had cleaned the damn thing out from the breached rear opening.

He found a flashlight in a desk drawer and used it to take a closer look behind the gap. He saw an edge of something white wedged between the sheared off back plate and the safe at the very bottom edge.

He went and got a coat hanger, bent it into a precise angle, and used it to snag what turned out to be a piece of paper. He pulled it free and read through the document. It was a copy of an invoice for aviation fuel at an outfit operating at LA International. And the bill was addressed to Green and Ransome at the office in Beverly Hills. He scanned the invoice for any other useful information. The plane in question was a Beechcraft Model 18, and the aircraft was owned by BMG, Inc. Archer figured the initials might stand for Bart and Mallory Green.

Our plane, our pilot.

He folded the invoice and put it in his pocket. It would make sense that Bender would be interested in Green’s plane, since he could be using it to fly mistresses out of the city and to safer climes for a little party and sack time. In the files that had been taken Bender might have had itineraries for the plane, lists of passengers and the like. And the calendar would show meetings Bender would have had and with whom. Someone had obviously not wanted that information to remain in his hands. But there was a key question: Was infidelity a motivation for murder? Green had cheated before. His wife didn’t want a divorce because that would give her ex a clear field to run amok while doing her professional damage. So why would Bart Green care if the truth about his affairs came out?

A knock on the door preceded Anne Bender’s poking her head in. “We should go. Did you find anything helpful?”

“Yes, Mrs. Bender,” said Archer. “I think I did.”

She moved into the room. “Will you do one thing for me, Mr. Archer?”

“Certainly, anything.”

The mask of grief and solemnity vanished for an instant and the woman’s features flashed with the anger and fierceness of the prematurely bereaved.

“Will you find the son of a bitch that did this to my husband?”