The Chill

Chapter 30

Passing through the lobby of the Surf House, I noticed Helen’s mother sitting by herself in a far corner. She was deep in thought and she didn’t look up until I spoke:

“You’re sitting up late, Mrs. Hoffman.”

“I don’t have much choice,” she said resentfully. “I’m supposed to be sharing a cottage with Mrs. Deloney, and it was entirely her idea. But she put me out so she can entertain her friend in private.”

“You mean Roy Bradshaw?”

“That’s what he calls himself now. I knew George Bradshaw when he was glad to be given a good hot meal, and I served him more than one in my own kitchen.”

I pulled up a chair beside hers. “All this adds up to an interesting coincidence.”

“I think it does, too. But I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

“Who says so?”

“Mrs. Deloney.”

“Does she tell you what to do?”

“No, but it was nice of her to take me out of that crummy room in the Pacific Hotel and–” She paused, considering.

“And stash you in the lobby here?”

“It’s only temporary.”

“So is life. Are you and your husband going to take orders from people like the Deloneys until the day you die? You get nothing out of it, you know, except the privilege of being pushed around.”

“Nobody pushes Earl around,” she said defensively. “You leave Earl out of this.”

“Have you heard from him?”

“I haven’t, and I’m worried about Earl. I tried to phone home two nights in a row, and nobody answered. I’m afraid he’s drinking.”

“He’s in the hospital,” I said.

“Is he sick?”

“He made himself sick with too much whisky.”

“How do you know that?”

“I helped to get him to the hospital. I was in Bridgeton yesterday morning. Your husband talked to me, quite freely toward the end. He admitted Luke Deloney had been murdered but he had orders from the top to let it go as an accident.”

Her eyes darted around the lobby, shyly and shamefully. There was no one in sight but the night clerk and a couple who didn’t look married renting a room from him. But Mrs. Hoffman was as nervous as a cricket on a crowded floor.

“You might as well tell me what you know,” I said. “Let me buy you a cup of coffee.”

“I’d be up all night.”

“A cup of cocoa then.”

“Cocoa sounds good.”

We went into the coffee shop. Several orchestra members in mauve jackets were drinking coffee at the counter and complaining in the language of their tribe about the pay. I sat in a booth facing Mrs. Hoffman and the plate glass door, so that I could see Bradshaw if he came out through the lobby.

“How did you come to know Bradshaw, Mrs. Hoffman?”

“Helen brought him home from City College. I think she was stuck on him for a while, but I could see that he wasn’t stuck on her. They were more friends. They had interests in common.”

“Like poetry?”

“Like poetry and play-acting. Helen said he was very talented for a boy his age, but he was having a hard time staying in college. We wangled him a part-time job running the elevator in the apartments. All it paid was five a week, but he was glad to have it. He was as thin as a rake and as poor as Job’s turkey when we knew him. He claimed he came from a wealthy family in Boston, that he ran away from his freshman year at Harvard to be on his own. I never really believed him at the lime – I thought he was maybe ashamed of his folks and putting on the dog – but I guess it was true after all. They tell me his mother is loaded.” She gave me a questioning look.

“Yes. I know her.”

“Why would a young fellow run away from all that money? I spent most of my own life trying to get a little to stick to my fingers.”

“Money usually has strings attached to it.”

I didn’t go into a fuller explanation. The waitress brought Mrs. Hoffman’s cocoa and my coffee. I said when she had retreated behind the counter:

“Have you ever known a woman named Macready? Letitia O. Macready?”

Mrs. Hoffman’s hand fumbled with her cup and spilled some brown liquid in the saucer. I was fleetingly conscious that her hair was dyed an unlikely shade of red and that she might once have been a handsome woman with a good figure and a gaudy taste in clothes. But she couldn’t be Tish Macready. She’d been married to Earl Hoffman for over forty years.

She put a folded paper napkin under her cup to absorb the spillage. “I knew her to say hello to.”

“In Bridgeton?”

“I’m not supposed to talk about Letitia. Mrs. Deloney–”

“Your daughter’s in a refrigerated drawer and all you give me is Mrs. Deloney.”

She bowed her head over the shiny formica table. “I’m afraid of her,” she said, “of what she can do to Earl.”

“Be afraid of what she’s already done to him. She and her political pals made him seal up the Deloney case, and it’s been festering inside of him ever since.”

“I know. It’s the first time Earl ever laid down on the job deliberately.”

“You admit that?”

“I guess I have to. Earl never said it out in so many words, but I knew, and Helen knew. It’s why she left us.”

And why, perhaps, in the long run Helen couldn’t stay honest.

“Earl had a great respect for Luke Deloney,” the woman was saying, “even if Luke did have his human failings. He was the one who made good for all of us in a manner of speaking. His death hit Earl real hard, and he started drinking right after, seriously I mean. I’m worried about Earl.” She reached across the table and touched the back of my hand with her dry fingertips. “Do you think he’ll be all right?”

“Not if he keeps on drinking. He ought to survive this bout. I’m sure he’s being well taken care of. But Helen isn’t.”

“Helen? What can anybody do for Helen?”

“You can do something for her by telling the truth. Her death deserves an explanation at least.”

“But I don’t know who killed her. If I did I’d shout it from the housetops. I thought the police were after that man McGee who killed his wife.”

“McGee has been cleared. Tish Macready killed his wife, and probably your daughter as well.”

She shook her head solemnly. “You’re mistaken, mister. What you say isn’t possible. Tish Macready – Tish Osborne that was – she died long ago before either of those tragedies happened. I admit there were rumors about her at the time of Luke Deloney’s death, but then she had her own tragedy, poor thing.”

“You said ‘Tish Osborne that was.’ ”

“That’s right. She was one of Senator Osborne’s girls – Mrs. Deloney’s sister. I told you about them the other night when we were driving down here from the airport, how they used to ride to hounds.” She smiled faintly, nostalgically, as if she had caught a flash of red coats from her childhood.

“What were the rumors about her, Mrs. Hoffman?”

“That she was carrying on with Luke Deloney before his death. Some people said she shot him herself, but I never believed that.”

“Was she having an affair with Luke Deloney?”

“She used to spend some time in his apartment, that was no secret. She was kind of his unofficial hostess when Luke and Mrs. Deloney were separated. I didn’t think too much about it. She was already divorced from Val Macready. And she was Luke’s sister-in-law after all, I guess she had a right to be in his penthouse.”

“Did she have red hair?”

“More auburn, I’d say. She had beautiful auburn hair.” Mrs. Hoffman absently stroked her own dyed curls. “Tish Osborne had a lot of life in her. I was sorry to hear when she died.”

“What happened to her?”

“I don’t know exactly. She died in Europe when the Nazis ran over France. Mrs. Deloney still hasn’t got over it. She was talking about her sister’s death today.”

Something that felt like a spider with wet feet climbed up the back of my neck into the short hairs and made them bristle. The ghost of Tish or a woman (or a man?) using her name had come to the door of the house in Indian Springs ten years ago, more than ten years after the Germans overran France.

“Are you certain she’s dead, Mrs. Hoffman?”

She nodded. “There was quite a writeup in the papers, even the Chicago papers. Tish Osborne was the belle of Bridgeton in her time. I can remember back in the early twenties her parties were famous. The man she married, Val Macready, had meat-packing money on his mother’s side.”

“Is he still alive?”

“The last I heard of him, he married an Englishwoman during the war and was living in England. He wasn’t a Bridgeton boy and I never really knew him. I just read the society pages, and the obituaries.”

She sipped her cocoa. Her look, her self-enclosed posture, seemed to be telling me that she had survived. Her daughter Helen had been brighter, Tish Osborne had been wealthier, but she was the one who had survived. She would survive Earl, too, and probably make a shrine of the study where he kept his liquor in the roll-top desk.

Well, I had caught one of the old ladies. The other one would be tougher.

“Why did Mrs. Deloney fly out here?”

“I guess it was just a rich woman’s whim. She said she wanted to help me out in my time of trouble.”

“Were you ever close to her?”

“I hardly knew her. Earl knows her better.”

“Was Helen close to her?”

“No. If they ever met each other, it’s news to me.”

“Mrs. Deloney came a long way to help out a comparative stranger. Has she given you any particular help, apart from changing hotels?”

“She bought me lunch and dinner. I didn’t want her to pay, but she insisted.”

“What were you to do in return for the free room and board?”

“Nothing.”

“Didn’t she ask you not to talk about her sister Tish?”

“That’s true, she did. I wasn’t to say anything about her carrying on with Luke Deloney, or the rumors that went around about his death. She’s very sensitive about her sister’s reputation.”

“Abnormally sensitive, if Tish has really been dead for over twenty years. Who weren’t you supposed to mention these things to?”

“Anybody, especially you.”

She drowned her nervous little giggle in the remains of her cocoa.