Sleeping Beauty

chapter 32

There was a light in Tom Russo’s house. I knocked on the front door, and after a while I heard slow footsteps behind it. The door opened slightly.

I thought at the first uncertain glance that the face that appeared in the opening belonged to Tom, and that it had been deeply marked by grief. Then I saw that it was the face of an older man who resembled him. I said:

“Is Tom at home?”

“What do you want with him?”

“We have some business.”

“What kind of business?”

In a younger man, his abrupt questions would have been rude or even hostile. But I sensed the anxiety behind them, the old man’s vulnerability.

“I’m a private detective, and I’ve been helping Tom to look for his wife. Do you happen to know where he is?”

“He had to give his cousin a lift someplace.”

“Redondo Beach?”

“I think he mentioned Redondo. He asked me to stay here in case anything came up. But he should have been back long ago.”

“Are you his father?”

“That’s right.” His dark eyes showed some pleasure. “There always was a resemblance between he and I. A lot of people make a comment about it. Do you want to come in? Tom should be home any time.”

“I’ll wait. I have some information for Tom.”

He took me into the front room and we sat facing each other. He was a fairly good-looking man of seventy or so, with a lot of wavy iron-gray hair. He wore a dark suit which had recently been pressed.

“Information about his wife?” he asked me after a long polite pause.

“About his wife,” I said, “and about his mother.”

He flinched and looked down at his hands, which were slightly misshapen and lined with ineradicable grime. “I was married to Tom’s mother.”

“What happened to her, Mr. Russo?”

“She was shot to death in this house when Tom was a little boy.” He looked up anxiously. “Has Tom been asking questions about his mother?”

“He was dreaming about her this morning.”

Russo leaned forward stiffly from the waist. “What did he say?”

I avoided answering his question. “Nothing that made much sense. Does he know what happened to her, Mr. Russo?”

The old man shook his head. “He knew at the time, all right, but then he forgot about it. I let him forget. Maybe I made a mistake. I was thinking tonight that maybe I made a mistake. When he picked me up at the home today, I hardly knew my boy. He wasn’t the happy, cheerful boy I raised. But if I made a mistake I had my reasons. He was so young when it happened – no more than five – I didn’t think it would leave any mark on him. I thought we could move back here, him and I, and start together with a clean slate.” His voice and eyes were profoundly disappointed.

“Move back here from where, Mr. Russo?”

“Bremerton, in the state of Washington. It all started during the war, when I went to Bremerton to work in the shipyards. I rented this house to some people and took Allie and little Tom along with me. But they didn’t stay. Allie made up her mind to leave me. She brought little Tom back here and they lived in this house for a year while I stayed on in Bremerton by myself.”

“When did you come back?”

“Not until after Allie was dead. They brought me down here when they found her body. Somebody shot her. I guess I told you that.”

“Where did they find her body, Mr. Russo?”

“On the floor in the back bedroom.” He flung out a heavy careless arm toward the room where Tom had been dreaming that morning, dreaming as if he had fallen asleep as a child and had never fully awakened.

“And where was Tom?”

“He was here in the house with her. He must have been here alone with her for a while. The police said she was dead for several days already when they found her.” Sudden tears brightened his eyes. “Tom went to the neighbors when he finally ran out of anything to eat. Don’t ask me why he didn’t go before. I think he was scared to. You know how little kids are. They think they’ll get blamed for everything that happens.”

“Did you talk to him about it?”

“Not very much. I let the sleeping dogs lie.” He dashed his tears away with his fingers, first from one eye, then the other. “Maybe you think I made a mistake when I stayed on in this house with Tom. But it was my house, and I had a right to live here. It was the only house I ever owned. I got a real good buy on it when I married Tom’s mother in 1937. Tom has his reasons to be grateful for this house. I borrowed on it to send him to pharmacy school. He makes good money as a pharmacist, and now he’s buying the place from me. With Social Security, it’s what I’m living on at the home. I don’t know where I’d be without this house.”

“Nobody’s criticizing you, Mr. Russo.”

“That’s what you think. His mother’s people criticized me plenty for living here with Tom. I thought me and him could live it all down, you know?” But he glanced around the room as if the past had surrounded him and closed ranks. “What did Tom say to you this morning? Did he remember his mother and what happened to her?”

“I think he was trying to.”

“Did he name any names?”

“Not to me,” I said. “Did he name any names to you?” The old man shook his head. I studied his face, which was lined and segmented like a puzzle.

“Do you have any idea who killed her?”

He gave me an evasive look. “The way the police talked at first, they thought I killed her myself. But I could prove I was in Bremerton. I hadn’t even seen Allie for a year. More than a year.”

“Why did they suspect you?”

He made an explanatory movement with his open hands. “You know how they are. The husband is always the first one that they look for. And by the time they finished with me, the man that done it – the man that did it was halfway around the world.”

“Halfway around the world?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Do you have somebody definite in mind?”

“Yes, sir, I do.” He leaned toward me. His large-knuckled fingers closed on my knee. “I’m pretty sure who killed Allie. It all hangs together, see? She met him in Bremerton – he was in the skeleton crew of one of the escort carriers I helped to build. The Canaan Sound. He was the reason she left me in the first place. We had a fight about him and she walked out. She only stayed in Bremerton as long as the Canaan Sound was there, with Bagley aboard her – his name was Nelson Bagley. And when Bagley’s ship moved out of there, Allie moved out, too, and took my boy along with her.”

“How do you know Bagley killed her?”

“It all hangs together. When I came down from Bremerton to look after little Tom, he told me Bagley’d been here at the house.”

“Did he name him?”

“He described him to me. But when I tried to get Tom to talk to the police he clammed up. They said they had no evidence on Bagley – I could see it was me they wanted to hang it on. So I made my own investigation, and I got a reporter interested. He wrote a story about Bagley with everything in it except Bagley’s name – description and everything. I’m still as certain as I live that Nelson Bagley was the man.”

“What made you so certain?”

“The clincher,” he said, “was when I found out the Canaan Sound was anchored in Long Beach Harbor the night Allie was killed. That was Nelson Bagley’s ship, and Bagley had shore leave that night. He came into town here and killed her and went back aboard his ship. The very next morning – that was May 3, 1945 – she sailed for Okinawa. By the time they found Allie’s body, Nelson Bagley was halfway around the world.”

I made a note of the date he had given me. “Why did he kill her, Mr. Russo?”

“I think she took up with another man. It was crazy jealousy on Bagley’s part.”

“Do you know who the man was?”

“It could of been one of his shipmates, I don’t know. They were a wild-living crew in Bremerton. And they came to a bad end. I found out later what happened to that ship. She burned off Okinawa. Do you know what happened to Bagley? He was fried in oil, and that was heaven’s judgment on him. The final clincher.”

“There’s been another judgment on him,” I said. “Bagley was drowned last night. But I don’t think heaven had much to do with it.”

The old man rose and stood over me, swaying slightly. “How could he be drowned? He was a patient in the vets’ hospital.”

“He was. But Cousin Gloria and her boy friend took him out of there.”

His brow knitted. “How could they? The hospital people told me he was nothing more than a living corpse. They wouldn’t even let me see him.”

“When was that, Mr. Russo?”

“A long time ago, just after the war.”

“He improved a lot since then, apparently. But it didn’t do him much good in the long run.”

Russo walked to the far end of the room and came back very slowly. “You don’t think Gloria killed him, do you?”

“I don’t know. How does Gloria feel about the death of her aunt?”

“I never discussed it with her,” Russo said. “After Allie got herself killed, I never saw much of her side of the family. Gloria’s mother – that’s Allie’s sister Martie – is an unforgiving woman. Even after I proved to the authorities that I was in Bremerton when Allie was killed, her sister Martie never forgave me. She always believed that Allie left me in Bremerton because I treated her bad. But that was a lie. I treated Allie the best way I knew how.” He looked at me with eyes like the charred ends of memory. “Sometimes I wish I never bought this house. Never took up with Allie. Never had the boy. The whole thing went sour on me.”

“Why, Mr. Russo?”

He sat with his face quiet and open to the past. “This is a bad house for marriages. Look at what happened to my son’s marriage. I made a mistake to ever buy this house.”