How Like an Angel

Three

Olive Street was in a section of town that was beginning to show its age but still trying to preserve appearances. Seven-o-two was flanked by patches of well-kept lawn. In the middle of one a white oleander bloomed, and in the middle of the other stood an orange tree bearing both fruit and blossoms at the same time. A boy’s bicycle leaned carelessly against the tree as if its owner had suddenly found something more interesting to do. The windows of the small stucco house were closed and the blinds drawn. Someone had recently hosed off the sidewalk and the porch. Little puddles steamed in the sun and disappeared even as Quinn watched.

The front door had an old-fashioned lion’s-head knocker made of brass, newly polished. Reflected in it Quinn could see a tiny crooked reflection of himself. In a way it matched his own self-image.

The woman who answered the door was, like the house, small and neat and no longer young. Although her features were pretty and her figure still good, her face lacked any spark of interest or animation. It was as if, at some time during her life, she had stepped outside and had never been able to find her way back in.

Quinn said, “Mrs. O’Gorman?”

“Yes. But I’m not buying anything.”

She’s not selling either, Quinn thought. “I’m Joe Quinn. I used to know your husband.”

She didn’t exactly unbend but she seemed faintly interested. “That was you on the telephone?”

“Yes. It was kind of a shock to me, suddenly hearing that he was dead. I came by to offer my condolences and apologize if my call upset you in any way.”

“Thank you. I’m sorry I hung up so abruptly. I wasn’t sure whether it was a joke or not, or a piece of malice, having someone ask for Patrick after all these years. Everyone in Chicote knows that Patrick’s gone.”

Gone. Quinn registered the word and her hesitation before saying it.

“Where did you know my husband, Mr. Quinn?”

There was no safe reply to this but Quinn picked one he considered fairly safe. “Pat and I were in the service together.”

“Oh. Well, come inside. I was just making some lemonade to have ready for the children when they get home.”

The front room was small and seemed smaller because of the wallpaper and carpeting. Mrs. O’Gorman’s taste—or perhaps O’Gorman’s—ran to roses, large red ones in the carpet, pink and white ones in the wallpaper. An air-conditioner, fitted into the side window, was whirring noisily but without much effect. The room was still hot.

“Please sit down, Mr. Quinn.”

“Thank you.”

“Now tell me about my husband.”

“I was hoping you’d tell me.”

“But that isn’t how it’s done, is it?” Mrs. O’Gorman said. “When a man comes to offer condolences to the widow of his old war buddy, reminiscences are usually called for, aren’t they? So please start reminiscing. You have my undivided attention.”

Quinn sat in an uneasy silence.

“Perhaps you’re the shy kind, Mr. Quinn, who needs a little help getting started. How about, ‘I’ll never forget the time that—’? Or you might prefer a more dramatic approach. For instance, the Germans were coming over the hill in swarms and you lay trapped inside your wrecked tank, injured, with only your good buddy Pat O’Gorman to look after you. You like that?”

Quinn shook his head. “Sorry, I never saw any Germans. Koreans, yes.”

“All right, switch locales. The scene changes to Korea. There’s not much sense in wasting that hill and the wrecked tank—”

“What’s on your mind, Mrs. O’Gorman?”

“What’s on yours?” she said with a small steely smile. “My husband was not in the service, and he never allowed anyone to call him Pat. So suppose you start all over, taking somewhat less liberty with the truth.”

“There isn’t any truth in this case, or very little. I never met your husband. I didn’t know he was dead. In fact, all I knew was his name and the fact that he lived here in Chicote at one time.”

“Then why are you here?”

“That’s a good question,” Quinn said, “I wish I could think of an equally good answer. The truth just isn’t plausible.”

“The listener is supposed to be the judge of plausibility. I’m listening.”

Quinn did some fast thinking. He had already disobeyed Sister Blessing’s orders not to try and contact O’Gorman. To bring her name into it now would serve no purpose. And ten chances to one Mrs. O’Gorman wouldn’t believe a word of it anyway, since the Brothers and Sisters of the Tower of Heaven didn’t make for a very convincing story. There was one possible way out: if O’Gorman’s death had taken place under peculiar circumstances (and Quinn remembered the way Mrs. O’Gorman had hesitated over the word “gone”) she might want to talk about it. And if she did the talking, he wouldn’t have to.

He said, “The fact is, I’m a detective, Mrs. O’Gorman.”

Her reaction was quicker and more intense than he had anticipated. “So they’re going to start in all over again, are they? I get a year or two of peace, I reach the point where I can walk down the street without people staring at me, feeling sorry for me, whispering about me. Now things will be right back where they were in the first place, newspaper headlines, silly men asking silly questions. My husband died by accident, can’t they get that through their thick skulls? He was not murdered, he did not commit suicide, he did not run away to begin a new life with a new identity. He was a devout and devoted man and I will not have his memory tarnished any further. As for you, I suggest you stick to tagging parked cars and picking up kids with expired bicycle licenses. There’s a bicycle in the front yard you can start with, it hasn’t had a license for two years. Now get out of here and don’t come back.”

Mrs. O’Gorman wasn’t a woman either to argue with or to try and charm. She was intelligent, forceful and embittered, and the combination was too much for Quinn. He left quickly and quietly.

Driving back to Main Street, he attempted to convince himself that his job was done except for the final step of reporting to Sister Blessing. O’Gorman had died by accident, his wife claimed. But what kind of accident? If the police had once suspected voluntary disappearance, it meant the body had never been found.

“My work is over,” he said aloud. “The whys and wheres and hows of O’Gorman’s death are none of my business. After five years the trail’s cold anyway. On to Reno.”

Thinking of Reno didn’t help erase O’Gorman from his mind. Part of Quinn’s job at the club, often a large part, was to be on the alert for men and women wanted by the police in other states and countries. Photographs, descriptions and Wanted circulars arrived daily and were posted for the security officers to study. A great many arrests were made quietly and quickly without interfering with a single spin of the roulette wheels. Quinn had once been told that more people wanted by the police were picked up in Reno and Las Vegas than in any other places in the country. The two cities were magnets for bank robbers and embezzlers, conmen and gangsters, any crook with a bank roll and a double-or-nothing urge.

Quinn parked his car in front of a cigar store and went in to buy a newspaper. The rack contained a variety, three from Los Angeles, two from San Francisco, a San Felice Daily Press, a Wall Street Journal, and a local weekly, The Chicote Beacon. Quinn bought a Beacon and turned to the editorial page. The paper was published on Eighth Avenue, and the publisher and editor was a man named John Harrison Ronda.

Ronda’s office was a cubicle surrounded by six-foot walls, the bottom-half wood paneling, the top-half plate glass. Standing, Ronda could see his whole staff, seated at his desk he could blot them all out. It was a convenient arrangement.

He was a tall, pleasant-faced, unhurried man in his fifties, with a deep resonant voice. “What can I do for you, Quinn?”

“I’ve just been talking to Patrick O’Gorman’s wife. Or shall we say, widow?”

“Widow.”

“Were you in Chicote when O’Gorman died?”

“Yes. Matter of fact I’d just used my last dime to buy this paper. It was in the red at the time and might still be there if the O’Gorman business hadn’t occurred. I had two big breaks within a month. First O’Gorman, and then three or four weeks later one of the local bank tellers, a nice little lady—why are some of the worst embezzlers such nice little ladies?—was caught with her fingers in the till. All ten of them. The Beacon’s circulation doubled within a year. Yes, I owe a lot to O’Gorman and I don’t mind admitting it. He was the ill wind that blew the wolf away from my door. So you’re a friend of his widow’s, are you?”

“No,” Quinn said cautiously. “Not exactly.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. She’s surer.”

Ronda seemed disappointed. “I’ve always kept hoping Martha O’Gorman would suddenly come up with a secret boyfriend. It would be a great thing if she married again, some nice man her own age.”

“Sorry, I don’t fit the picture. I’m older than I look and I have a vile temper.”

“All right, all right, I get the message. What I said still goes, though. Martha should remarry, stop living in the past. Every year O’Gorman seems to become more perfect in her eyes. I admit he was a good guy—a devoted husband, a loving father —but dead good guys are about the same as dead bad ones where the survivors are concerned. In fact, Martha would be better off now if she found out O’Gorman had been a first-class villain.”

“Perhaps that’s still possible.”

“Not on your life,” Ronda said, shaking his head vigorously. “He was a gentle, timid man, the exact opposite of the fighting Irishman you hear about and maybe meet, though I never have myself. One of the things that drove the police crazy when they were on the murder kick was the fact that they couldn’t find a single soul in Chicote who had a bad word to say about O’Gorman. No grudges, no peeves, no quarrels. If O’Gorman was done in—and there’s no doubt of it, in my mind—it must have been by a stranger, probably a hitchhiker he picked up.”

“Timid men don’t usually go in for picking up hitchhikers.”

“Well, he did. It was one of the few things he disagreed with Martha about. She thought it was a dangerous practice but that didn’t stop him. Sympathy for the underdog was what motivated him. I guess he felt like an underdog himself.”

“Why?”

“Oh, he was never much of a success, financially or any other way. Martha had the guts and force in the family, which is a good thing because in the following years she really needed them. The insurance company held off settling O’Gorman’s policy for almost a year because his body wasn’t found. Meanwhile Martha and the two children were penniless. She went back to work as a lab technician in the local hospital. She’s still there.”

“You seem to know her well.”

“My wife’s one of her close friends, they attended the same high school in Bakersfield. For a time there, when I had to print a lot of stuff about O’Gorman, things were cool between Martha and me. But she came to understanding that I was only doing my job. What’s your interest in the case, Quinn?”

Quinn said something vague about his work in Reno involving missing persons. Ronda seemed satisfied. Or, if he wasn’t, he pretended to be. He was a man who obviously enjoyed talking and welcomed an occasion for it.

“So he was murdered by a hitchhiker,” Quinn said. “Under what circumstances?”

“I can’t remember every detail after such a time lapse but I can give you a general picture if you like.”

“I would.”

“It was the middle of February, nearly five and a half years ago. It had been a winter of big rains—most of the news I printed was rainfall statistics and stories on whose basement was flooded and whose backyard had been washed out. That year the Rattlesnake River, about three miles east of town, was running high. Now, and every summer, it’s nothing but a dry ravine, so it’s kind of hard to imagine what a torrent it was then. To make a long story short, O’Gorman’s car crashed through the guardrail of the bridge and into the river. It was found a couple of days later when the flood subsided. A piece of cloth snagged on the door hinge had bloodstains on it, barely visible to the naked eye but quite clearly identified in the police lab. The blood was O’Gorman’s type and the cloth was a piece of the shirt he’d been wearing when he left the house that night after dinner.”

“And the body?”

“A few miles farther on, the Rattlesnake River joins the Torcido, which is fed by mountain snow and lives up to its name. Torcido means angry, twisted, resentful, and that about describes it, especially that year. O’Gorman wasn’t a big man. He could easily have been carried down the Rattlesnake River into the Torcido and never found again. That’s what the police believed then and still believe. There’s another possibility, that he was murdered in the car after a struggle which tore his shirt, and then buried some place. I myself go along with the river theory. O’Gorman picked up a hitchhiker— don’t forget it was a stormy night and a soft-hearted man like O’Gorman wouldn’t pass up anyone on the road—and the hitchhiker tried to rob him and O’Gorman put up a fight. I myself believe the man must have been a stranger in these parts and didn’t realize the river was only temporary. He may have thought the car would never be found.”

“And then what happened to the stranger?” Quinn said.

Ronda lit a cigarette and scowled at the burning match. “Well, there’s the weak point of the story, of course. He disappeared as completely as O’Gorman. For a while there the sheriff was picking up damn near everyone who wasn’t actually born in Chicote, but nothing was proved. I’m an amateur student of crime in a way, and it seems to me a crime of impulse like this one, even though it’s often bungled by lack of planning, may remain unsolved because of the very lack of planning.”

“Who decided that it was a crime of impulse?”

“The sheriff, the coroner, the coroner’s jury. Why? Don’t you agree?”

“All I know is what you’ve told me,” Quinn said. “And that hitchhiking stranger seems a little vague.”

“I admit that.”

“If he had a bloody struggle with O’Gorman, we’ll have to assume the stranger got some blood on his own clothes. Were there any shacks or cottages in the vicinity where he could have broken in to change his clothes, steal some food and so on?”

“A few. But they weren’t broken into, the sheriff’s men checked every one of them.”

“So we’re left with a very wet stranger, probably with blood on him.”

“The rain could have washed it away.”

“It’s not that easy,” Quinn said. “Put yourself in the stranger’s place. What would you have done?”

“Walked into town, bought some dry clothes.”

“It was night, the stores were closed.”

“Then I’d have checked into a motel, I guess.”

“You’d be pretty conspicuous, the clerk would certainly remember and probably report you.”

“Well, dammit, he must have done something,” Ronda said. “Maybe he got a ride with somebody else. All I know is, he disappeared.”

“Or she. Or they.”

“All right, she, it, him or her, they disappeared.”

“If they ever existed.”

Ronda leaned across the desk. “What are you getting at?”

“Suppose the person in the car wasn’t a stranger. Let’s say it was a friend, a close friend, even a relative.”

“I told you before, the sheriff couldn’t find a single person who’d say a word against O’Gorman.”

“The kind of person I’m thinking of wouldn’t be likely to come forward and admit he had a grudge if he’d just murdered O’Gorman. Or she.”

“You keep repeating or she. Why?”

“Why not? We’re only dealing in possibilities anyway.”

“I think you mean Martha O’Gorman.”

“Wives,” Quinn said dryly, “have been known to harbor grudges against husbands.”

“Not Martha. Besides, she was at home that night, with the children.”

“Who were in bed, sleeping?”

“Naturally they were in bed, sleeping,” Ronda said irritably. “It was about 10:30. What do you think they were doing, playing poker and having a few beers? Richard was only seven then, and Sally five.”

“How old was O’Gorman at the time?”

“Around your age, say forty.”

Quinn didn’t correct him. He felt forty, it seemed only fair that he should look it. “What about O’Gorman’s description?”

“Blue eyes, fair skin, black curly hair. Medium build, about five foot nine or ten. There was nothing particularly arresting about his appearance but he was nice-looking.”

“Have you a picture of him?”

“Five or six blown-up snapshots. Martha let me have them while she was still hoping O’Gorman would be found alive, maybe suffering from amnesia. Her hopes died hard but once they died, that was it. She’s utterly convinced O’Gorman’s car hit the bridge accidentally and O’Gorman was swept away by the river.”

“And the piece of shirt with the bloodstains?”

“She thinks he was cut by the impact of the car against the guardrail. The windshield was broken and two of the windows, so it’s possible. There’s one argument against it, though: O’Gorman had the reputation of being a very cautious driver.”

“What about suicide?”

“Again, it’s possible,” Ronda said, “and again there are elements that refute it. First, he was a healthy man, with no real financial worries or emotional problems, none that came to light anyway. Second, he was a strict Catholic, as Martha is. And I mean the kind that practices religion and believes every last word and comma of it. Third, he was in love with his wife and crazy about his children.”

“A lot of what you’ve just told me doesn’t come under the heading of fact. Think about it, Ronda.”

“You think about it,” Ronda said, grimacing. “After five years of veering this way and veering that way, maybe I need a fresh approach. Go on.”

“All right. Let’s say a fact is what can be proved. Fact one, he was healthy. Fact two, he was a practicing Catholic for whom suicide would constitute a deadly sin. The other things you mentioned are not facts but inferences. He may have had financial and emotional problems he didn’t talk about. He may not have been as crazy about his wife and children as he pretended to be.”

“Then he put up quite a front. And, frankly, I don’t believe O’Gorman had the brains to put up any kind of front. I’d never say anything like this to Martha, but to me O’Gorman seemed almost dull-witted, in fact, stupid.”

“What did he do, for a living?”

“He was a pay-roll clerk for one of the oil companies. I’m pretty sure Martha helped him at night with his job though she’d die before admitting it. Martha’s loyalties are strong, even to her own mistakes.”

“Of which O’Gorman was one?”

“I think he’d have been a mistake for any really intelligent woman to marry. O’Gorman just didn’t have it. The two of them were more like mother and son than husband and wife, though Martha was actually a few years younger. I suppose the truth is that the pickings in Chicote, for a woman as bright as Martha, weren’t very good and she did the best she could. O’Gorman was, as I said, nice-looking with a lot of curly black hair and so on. When holes in the head are hidden by big blue eyes, even a woman like Martha can be susceptible. Fortunately, the kids take after her, they’re both sharp as tacks.”

“Mrs. O’Gorman,” Quinn said, “appears to have quite an aversion to the police.”

“It’s justified. She went through a very rough experience, and this isn’t a very civilized town. The sheriff’s an eager beaver who couldn’t build a dam if his life depended on it. His attitude throughout the whole affair seemed to be that Martha should have kept O’Gorman from going out in the rain that night, then nothing would have happened.”

“Just why did he go out?”

“According to Martha, he thought he’d made an error in one of the books that day and wanted to return to the field office to check.”

“Did anyone take the trouble to examine the books?”

“Oh yes. O’Gorman was right. A mistake had been made. The bookkeeper found it easily, a simple error in addition.”

“What do you think that proves?”

“Proves?” Ronda repeated, frowning. “That O’Gorman was dull-witted but conscientious, just as I said he was.”

“It could prove something else, though.”

“Such as?”

“That O’Gorman made that mistake deliberately.”

“Why would he do a thing like that?”

“So he’d have a legitimate excuse to go back to the field office that night. Did he often do work in the evenings?”

“I told you, I think Martha often helped him but she’d never admit it,” Ronda said. “Anyway, you’re out in left field as far as the facts are concerned. O’Gorman didn’t have the brains or the character for intrigue of any kind. Granted, a man can put on an act of being stupider than he is. But he can’t give a perfect performance twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, the way O’Gorman did. No, Quinn. There could only be one reason why he went back to the office that night, during the worst rainstorm of the year—he was scared stiff of being caught in an error and losing his job.”

“You seem sure.”

“Positive. You can sit there and dream up intrigues, secret meetings, conspiracies and whatever. I can’t. I knew O’Gorman. He couldn’t think his way out of a wet paper bag.”

“As you pointed out yourself, however, he had Mrs. O’Gorman to assist him in his work. Maybe she helped him in other things, too.”

“Look, Quinn,” Ronda said, slapping the desk with the flat of his hand. “We’re talking about two very nice people.”

“As nice as the little lady you mentioned who was caught with her fingers in the till? I’m not trying to give you a bad time, Ronda, I’m just puzzling a few possibilities.”

“The possibilities in this case are almost endless. Ask the sheriff, if you don’t believe me. Practically every crime in the book, except arson and infanticide, was suggested and investigated. Maybe you’d be interested in seeing my file on the case?”

“Very much,” Quinn said.

“I kept a personal file, in addition to what we printed in the Beacon, because of Martha being an old friend. Also because —well, frankly, I’ve always had the feeling that the case would be reopened some day, that maybe some burglar in Kansas City, or some guy up on another murder charge in New Orleans or Seattle, would confess to killing O’Gorman and settle everything once and for all.”

“Didn’t you ever think, or hope, that O’Gorman himself might turn up?”

“I hoped. I didn’t think, though. When O’Gorman left the house that night he had two one-dollar bills in his wallet, his car, and the clothes on his back, and that’s all. Martha handled the money for the family, she knew to a cent how much O’Gorman was carrying.”

“No clothes were missing from his closet?”

“None,” Ronda said.

“Did he have a bank account?”

“A joint one with Martha. He could easily have cashed a check that afternoon without Martha finding out about it until later, but he didn’t. He also didn’t borrow any money.”

“Did he have anything valuable he might have taken along to pawn?”

“He owned a wrist watch worth about a hundred dollars, a present from Martha. It was found in his bureau drawer.” Ronda lit another cigarette, leaned back in the swivel chair and studied the ceiling. “Aside from all the physical evidence which would rule out a voluntary disappearance, there is the emotional evidence: O’Gorman had become, over the years, completely dependent on Martha, he couldn’t have lasted a week without her, he was like a little boy.”

“Little boys his age can become a nuisance,” Quinn said dryly. “Maybe the police were wrong to rule out infanticide.”

“If that’s a joke, it’s a bad one.”

“Most of mine are.”

“I’ll get that file for you,” Ronda said, rising. “I don’t know why I’m doing all this, except I guess I’d like to see the case closed once and for all so Martha could start seriously considering remarriage. She’d make a fine wife. You probably haven’t seen her at her best.”

“No, and I doubt that I will.”

“She’s lively, full of fun—”

“The pitch doesn’t fit the product,” Quinn said, “and I’m not in the market.”

“You’re very suspicious.”

“By nature, training, experience and observation, yes.”

Ronda went out and Quinn sat back in the chair, frowning. Through the glass paneling he could see the tops of three heads, Ronda’s bushy gray one, a man’s crew cut, and a woman’s elaborate bee-hive-style coiffure, the color of persimmons.

The shirt, he thought. That’s it, it’s the shirt that bothers me, the piece of cloth snagged on the hinge of the car door. On the stormiest night of the year why wasn’t O’Gorman wearing a jacket or a raincoat?

Ronda came back, carrying two cardboard boxes labeled simply Patrick O’Gorman. The boxes contained newspaper clippings, photographs, snapshots, copies of telegrams and letters to and from various police officials. Though most of them originated in California, Nevada and Arizona, others came from remote parts of the country and Mexico and Canada. The material was arranged in chronological order, but to go through it all would require considerable time and patience.

Quinn said, “May I borrow the file overnight?”

“What do you intend to do with it?”

“Take it to my motel and examine it. There are one or two points I’d like to go into more fully—the condition of the car, for instance. Was there a heater in it and was it switched on?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“If the accident happened the way Mrs. O’Gorman believes it did, O’Gorman was driving around on the stormiest night of the year in his shirt sleeves.”

Ronda looked puzzled for a minute. “I don’t think anything was ever brought up concerning a heater in the car.”

“It should have been.”

“All right, take the stuff with you for tonight. Maybe you’ll come across some other little thing the rest of us missed.”

He sounded as if he felt the project was hopeless, and by eight o’clock that night Quinn was beginning to share the feeling. The facts in the case were meager, and the possibilities seemed endless.

Including infanticide, Quinn thought. Maybe Martha O’Gorman was getting pretty tired of her little boy, Patrick.

One item that especially interested Quinn was from a transcript of Martha O’Gorman’s testimony before the coroner’s jury: “It was about 8:30. The children were in bed sleeping and I was reading the newspaper. Patrick acted restless and worried, he couldn’t seem to settle down. Finally I asked him what was the matter and he told me he’d made a mistake that afternoon and wanted to go back to the field office to correct it before anyone discovered it. Patrick was so terribly conscientious about his work—please, I can’t go on. Please. Oh Lord, help me—”

Very touching, Quinn thought. But the fact remains, the children were asleep, and Martha and Patrick O’Gorman could have left the house together.

No evidence was brought out about a heater in the car, although the piece of wool flannel with the bloodstains on it was discussed at length. The blood type was the same as O’Gorman’s, and the flannel was part of a shirt O’Gorman frequently wore. Both Martha and two of O’Gorman’s fellow clerks identified it. It was a bright yellow and black plaid, of the Macleod tartan, and his co-workers had kidded O’Gorman about an Irishman wearing a Scotch tartan.

“All right,” Quinn said, addressing the blank wall. “Suppose I’m O’Gorman. I’m sick of being a little boy. I want to run away and see the world. But I can’t face up to Martha so I have to disappear. I arrange to be in an accident while I’m wearing a shirt that will be identified as mine by a lot of people. I choose the time carefully, when the river is high and it’s still raining. O.K., I rig the accident and the piece of flannel with my own blood on it. Then what? I’m left standing in my underwear in a heavy rainstorm three miles from town with only two bucks to my name. Great planning, O’Gorman, really great.”

By nine o’clock he was more than willing to believe in Ronda’s hitchhiking stranger.