Find a Victim

Chapter 19

I found Meyer in a cubicle in the corner of his warehouse, sitting idle at an invoice-strewn desk. He looked at my face as if the sight of it hurt his red-rimmed eyeballs.

“What happened to you?”

“I cut myself shaving.”

“What were you using, a power mower? I was commencing to think you ran out on me. Which maybe you should of at that. Brand wants me to take you off the case.”

“So?”

“So nothing. I don’t take orders from any young snot-nose that I helped to put in the courthouse with my good money.” Meyer leaned forward on his arms, his face like the graying mask of an old fox. “Only I wouldn’t do anything more to cross him if I was you. Brand is a bad one to cross.”

“I don’t take it so well myself.”

“Maybe not.” He squinted ironically at my damaged face. “But you’re not sheriff. Now where you been?”

“Lake Perdida.”

“Why go traipsing off there? I been trying to contact you all day, and I’m not the only one. The D. A. wants to see you. While you’ve been pooping off around the countryside, this case has been breaking open. You know the Buick that got left at the airbase–”

“I ought to. I was the one who reported it.”

“Anyway, they traced it to a car-dealer in Los Angeles. This redhead – what’s his name?”

“Bozey.”

“This Bozey bought it off a used-car lot around the first of September. He paid cash for it, a five-hundred-dollar bill and some smaller bills. When the dealer tried to deposit the money in his bank, the cashier caught it.”

“Hot?”

“It scorched his fingers. The money was part of the loot from a bank in Portland that got robbed last August. The bank in L. A. had a circular from the Oregon police listing the numbers of the bills. It was a big haul, over twenty thousand bucks altogether.”

“Bozey took a bank for twenty grand?”

Meyer nodded his shaggy head. “There’s a two-thousand-dollar reward out for the redhead. That should keep you on the ball. If anything will. What sent you up to the lake, for God’s sake? Maybe you thought you’d get in a little fishing on my time?”

I almost walked out on him. One thing kept me: I needed more time with Meyer.

“Call it fishing. I caught something.” I laid the scuffed brown heel on the desk. “Does this belong to your daughter Anne?”

He turned it over in his fingers, gently, as if it possessed a feminine sensitivity. “I wouldn’t know if it’s Annie’s or not. I never paid much attention to what a woman wears. Where did it come from?”

I told him.

“That don’t sound so good for Annie.” He rolled the heel on the desk like a misshapen dice. “What do you make of it?”

I leaned on a bookkeeper’s stool against the wall and lit a cigarette. “I have a hunch that she was digging a grave. It could have been intended for her, or somebody eke.”

“Who else? Kerrigan?”

“Not Kerrigan. He was superintending the job.”

“It don’t make sense to me. Are you sure it was Annie with him?”

“I have a couple of witnesses. Neither of them made a positive identification, but I think they’re just being cautious. If this heel is hers, it clinches it.”

He picked it up from the litter on the desk, and scratched his stubby chin with the exposed nails. The sound rasped on my nerve-ends.

“Hilda would know, maybe.”

He reached for the telephone and dialed a number. On the plywood wall behind his head the end of an old motto protruded from under a bright new girlie calendar: I married a woman. But that came to an end. Get a good dog, boys, He will be your friend.

Meyer spoke into the mouthpiece: “Hello, Brand, is Hilda around?”

The telephone squawked negatively.

“Know where she is?”

The sheriff’s voice was denatured by its passage through the wires, but recognizable: “No. I don’t.” His voice sank, and I missed the rest of what he said.

Meyer listened with a lengthening face. “Well, what do you know about that? Personally I think she’s making a big mistake, and I’ll tell her that if I see her.” He dropped the receiver. “Brand says she’s gone and left him. Packed her clothes and moved out.”

“Did he say why?”

“Not him. But I happen to know they never did get along too well together. She used to say he treated her cruel, before she stopped talking about it.” There was a queer little smile on Meyer’s mouth, half anxious and half mocking. The in-law relationship usually cut two ways.

“Cruel?”

“I don’t mean he beat her, anyway not where it showed. Mental cruelty was what she complained of. He must of been a Tartar at that, to make her want to kill herself.”

“She tried to kill herself?”

“That’s right. She took a handful of sleeping-pills, way back when they were first married. Brand tried to cover up and pass it off as an accident, but I got the truth of it from Annie. Annie was with them in those days.”

“What made her want to do it?”

“I guess he made her life so miserable that she couldn’t stand it. I don’t know. I never understood any woman, let alone my own girls. I never could talk to either of them. I say black, they say white – that’s the way it’s always been.”

His raw and broken sentimentality depressed me. The barren little office was stifling hot, and I felt as if I’d been trapped in it for hours.

“Where do you think she is?”

“Search me.”

“You could try your house.”

“Yeah,” he said dubiously.

He picked up the receiver and dialed again. At the other end of the line the telephone chirped like a tired cricket.

“Hilda? Is that you? What the hell are you doing there? – No, hold it. I want to talk to you. And Archer has something to show you. We’ll be right over.”

I followed his Lincoln across town and parked in the drive beside his private junkyard. The house was even uglier by daylight, a peeling yellow face with blinded windows, surrounded by a wild green hair of eucalyptus trees. If Hilda Church had traded her marriage in on this, there was something very wrong with the marriage.

She opened the screen door for us. Meyer looked her up and down and brushed in past her without a word.

“How are you, Mr. Archer?”

“I could be better. I have been worse. And you?”

“I’m perfectly all right. Thank you.” But she looked as though she had spent a bad night. Her green eyes were dusky and vague, and there were bluish patches under them. She smiled with false brightness. “Please come in.”

She led me into the living-room, walking with obvious hesitancy. She reminded me of a small girl moving awkwardly in a body that had outgrown her, threatened by the sharp corners of the world.

I sat on the old davenport across from the fireplace. Its ashes had been cleaned out. The entire room had been swept and dusted and set in order. Meyer didn’t seem to notice. She looked at him reproachfully, wiping her nervous white hands on her apron front.

“I’ve been cleaning the house for you, Father.”

He answered without looking at her: “You don’t have to stay here and do for me. You’ll be better off in the long run if you go home and look after your husband.”

“I’m not going back,” she said sharply. “If you don’t want me here, I’ll go and find a place of my own, like Anne.”

“Anne’s another story. She’s got no permanent ties, and she’s self-supporting.”

“I can support myself, too, if you don’t want me.”

“It isn’t that. If you’re set on staying here, it’s okay by me. Only how’s it going to look to other people?”

“What other people?”

“People in town.” He gestured loosely. “All the people that voted for Brand. It doesn’t make a good appearance, breaking up the family at a time like this.”

“I have no family.”

“You could have if you wanted to, you’re not too old.”

“What do you know about it?” she said in a breaking voice. “I’m not going back and that’s final. It’s my life.”

“It’s his life, too. You’re fouling it up for him.”

“He fouled it for himself. He can do what he wants to with his life. I don’t belong to him, or anybody.”

“You never talked like this before.” Meyer sounded bewildered.

“Brandon never acted like this before.”

“Why, what did he do?”

“I wouldn’t tell you, I’d be ashamed to.” Tears glazed her eyes. “You were always after Anne and me to come home and keep house for you. Now that I’m doing it, you’re not satisfied. You don’t like anything I do.”

“Sure I do, Peaches.”

He tried to touch her shoulder. She drew away. His unpracticed hand hovered in the air for a tremulous instant, then dropped to his side.

I stood up, hoping to break the weary tension that stretched between them. “Mrs. Church, I have something here for you to look at.” I produced the talismanic heel. “Your father thought you might be able to identify it.”

She went to one of the windows and raised the blind. Light poured in over her head and shoulders, electroplating her brown hair. She turned the leather object in her hand.

“Where did you find this?”

“In the mountains near Lake Peridida. Did your sister have a pair of walking shoes that shade of brown?”

“Yes, I think she did. In fact I know she did.” She crossed the room toward me, clumsy with agitation. “Something has happened to Anne. Hasn’t it? Tell me the truth.”

“I wish I knew it. If that’s her heel, she was out in the woods with Kerrigan last Monday, digging a hole in the ground.”

“Digging her own grave, maybe,” Meyer said lugubriously.

“You think she’s dead, Mr. Archer.”

“I don’t mean to frighten you unnecessarily, but it’s a good idea to expect the worst. Then any surprises we get will come as a relief.”

She looked down at the heel clenched in her fist. When she opened her hand, I saw that the nails had made red indentations in her palm. She laid it against her mouth and closed her eyes. I thought for a second she was going to faint. Her body swayed slightly but heavily like a marble statue rocked on its base by an aftershock. But she didn’t fall.

Her eyes opened. “Is that all? Or is there more?”

“I found these in Kerrigan’s cabin at the lake.” I showed her the brown bobby pins that I’d picked out of the bearskin.

“Anne always wore bobby pins like that.”

Meyer peered over her shoulder. “That’s right, she used to scatter them around the house. So she spent the weekend with Kerrigan, eh?”

“I doubt it. But there was a man with her. Do you have any idea who he was?”

Father and daughter looked at each other wordlessly.

“Tony Aquista was up there last Saturday night”

“What was Tony doing at the lake?” Meyer said.

“He could have been the man. They were pretty close at one time, closer than you realize.”

“I don’t believe it.” Hilda’s face was white and rigid. “My sister wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole.”

“That’s what you think,” Meyer said. “You never knew what went on in Annie’s head. You convinced yourself that she was a little white saint, but I know damn well what she was. She had hot – she was always a wild one. And she played Tony along the way she played the others until he got too rough for her.”

“It isn’t true.” She turned to me. “You mustn’t listen to Father. Anne was never wild. She was really too innocent for her own good. It never entered her head that she could get involved in – scandal.”

Meyer snorted: “Innocent! She was messing around with them before she was out of pigtails, any size, any color. I caught her in this house, right here in this very room – I whaled the daylights out of her.”

Hilda’s face was pale and shiny, except for the dark crepe patches under her eyes. She said in a measured voice: “You’re a dirty old liar.”

He turned dead white. “So I’m a dirty old liar, am I?”

“Yes, and I’ll tell you why. You liked her too much. You were jealous of the boys, jealous of your own daughter–”

“You’re a crazy woman, talking like that in front of a stranger, blackening your old man.”

His voice strangled in his throat. His hand flew up as if of its own accord and struck her once, sharply, across the face.

“Don’t, Father.”

I stepped between them, facing Meyer. Emotion shook him the way a terrier shakes a rag. It let go of him suddenly. He collapsed on the davenport, limp as a corpse, but breathing audibly through his mouth.

I stood over him. “Meyer, who killed your daughter?”

“I don’t know,” he said in a thin old voice. “You’re not even sure she’s dead.”

“I’m sure enough. Did you kill her yourself?”

“You’re way off the beam. You’re as crazy as she is. I wouldn’t hurt a hair of Annie’s head.”

“You did once. And I wouldn’t throw words like ‘crazy’ around. They can boomerang.”

“Who you been talking to?”

“A person who knows your background, and what you did to Anne.”

He sat up unsteadily, his head lolling on his furred and wattled neck “That was ten years ago. I was younger then, I didn’t have good control of myself.” His voice swayed heavily into self-pity. “It wasn’t all my fault. She ran around the house without her clothes. Played up to me the same as she did to the others. It got so I couldn’t keep her out of my room. I couldn’t stop myself. You don’t know how it was, being without a woman all those years.”

“Get a crying towel, old man. Don’t blubber to me. A man who did what you did would do murder.”

He shook his head violently from side to side, as if it was encumbered by invisible chickens coming home to roost. “It’s all over, all passed over. I never laid hands on Annie since that time.”

“What about the gun you said you gave her? Was that a straight story, Meyer?”

“Sure it was. Honest to God.” He crossed his chest with his finger, making the gesture seem obscene. “I gave her this old police positive that I had. She was scared of Aquista, see. If anybody killed her, it was Aquista. That stands to reason, don’t it?”

“Who killed Aquista, then?”

“Not me. If you think I knocked off my own driver, you’re nuts.” His red-veined gaze rose to my face and hardened. “Listen, mister, I don’t like this. I don’t like anything about this. You’re supposed to be working for me.”

“I resign.”

“That suits me down to the ground. Now get to hell out of my house.”

I started for the door.

“Wait a minute, you owe me a hundred dollars. I want it back.”

“Sue me.”

He tried to get to his feet and fell back onto the davenport. His breathing was fast and loud. His limbs jerked convulsively. I looked around for Hilda.

The screen door slammed.