The Way Some People Die

Chapter 26

I woke up looking for the joker that would freeze the pile and win the hand for me. It wasn’t under the pillow. It wasn’t between the sheets. It wasn’t on the floor beside the bed. I was climbing out of the bed to look underneath it when I realized that I had been dreaming.

It was exactly noon by my bedside alarm. A truck started up in the street outside with an impatient clash of gears, as if to remind me that the world was going on without me. I let it go. First I took a long hot shower and then a short cold one. The pressure of the water hurt the back of my head. I shaved and brushed my teeth for the first time in two days and felt unreasonably virtuous. My face looked the same as ever, as far as I could tell. It was wonderful how much a pair of eyes could see without being changed by what they saw. The human animal was almost too adaptable for its own good.

The kitchen was brimful of yellow sunlight that poured in through the window over the sink. I started a pot of coffee, fried some bacon, broke four eggs in the sizzling grease, toasted half a dozen slices of stale bread. After eating, I sat in the breakfast nook with a cigarette and a cup of black coffee, thinking of nothing. Silence and loneliness were nice for a change. The absence of dialogue was a positive pleasure that lasted through the second cup of coffee. But I noticed after a while that I was tapping one heel on the floor in staccato rhythm and beginning to bite my left thumbnail. A car passed in the street with the sound of a bus I was about to miss. The yellow sunlight was bleak on the linoleum. The third cup of coffee was too bitter to drink.

I went to the phone in the hall and dialed my answering service. A Mrs. Caroline Standish had phoned on Monday and again on Tuesday. No, she hadn’t left her number; she said she would call again. A Mrs. Samuel Lawrence had phoned twice Tuesday morning. Tuesday afternoon a certain Lieutenant Gray had wanted to speak to me, very urgently. There had also been a call from Mr. Colton of the D. A.’s office. The only Wednesday call was long-distance from Palm Springs. A Mrs. Marjorie Fellows wanted me to call her back at the Oasis Inn.

“When did you get that last one?”

“About two hours ago. Mrs. Fellows called about ten thirty.”

I thanked the cool female voice, depressed the bar, and dialed Long Distance. They got me Marjorie Fellows person-to-person.

“This is Archer. You wanted to talk to me.”

“I do, very much. So many things have been happening, I don’t know which way to turn.” She sounded rather beaten and bewildered.

“Give me an example.”

“What did you say?”

“Give me an example, of the things that have been happening.”

“Oh, so many things. The police and – other things. I don’t like to speak of them over the telephone. You know these switchboard operators.” She said it with direct malice, to a hypothetical operator listening on the line. “Could you possibly come out and talk to me here?”

“It might be more convenient if you came to town.”

“I can’t. I have no car. Besides, I’m quite disorganized. I’ve been so depending on you. I don’t know anyone at all in southern California.” A whine ran through the flat mid-western voice, in and out in a pattern of self-pity. “You are a private detective, as Lieutenant Gary said?”

“I am. What happened to your car?”

“Henry – is using it.”

“You can fly in from Palm Springs in half an hour.”

“No, I couldn’t possibly fly. Don’t you understand, I’m terribly upset. I need your help, Mr. Archer.”

“Professionally speaking?”

“Yes, professionally speaking. Won’t you come out and have lunch with me at the Inn?”

I said I would, if she was willing to wait for a late lunch. I put on a tie and jacket, and loaded a revolver.

By-passing Palm Springs, I reached Oasis shortly after two thirty. Its grid of roads lay on the flat desert, a blueprint for a boom hopefully waiting for the boom to happen. An escarpment of black stone overshadowed the unbuilt town, its steep sides creased and folded like a stiff black tarpaulin thrown carelessly on the horizon. Beyond it the desert stretched into rainbow distances. The bright new copper penny of the sun spun in its heat against a flat painted sky.

The stucco buildings of the Oasis Inn were dazzling white in the daytime. It was a pueblo hotel with the main building fronting the road and about twenty detached cottages scattered behind it.

The watered lawn around them looked artificial and out of place, like a green broadloom carpet spread on the arid earth. I parked against the adobe wall beside the portico, and entered the lobby. Its air-conditioning chilled the sweat on my forehead. The big room was lined and furnished with light wood and leather, draped and upholstered with desert-colored cloth in Indian patterns. Whoever did it had both money and taste, an unusual combination anywhere.

The man behind the desk was expecting me. He called me by name and turned me over to a Filipino in a white-drill steward’s jacket. I followed his thin impassive back down a concrete walk between spaced rows of cottages. Several half-naked bodies, male and female, were broiling in the sun or reclining on long chairs in the shadowed porches: castaways from Hollywood and Chicago and New York. More castaways were grouped around the pool that shimmered at the rear of the compound. Dolce far niente with a dollar sign.

My Filipino guide led me onto the porch of one of the smaller cottages and knocked discreetly on the screen door. When Marjorie Fellows appeared he said “Mr. Archer” and vanished.

She looked larger than life in a sleeveless linen dress that emphasized the width of her shoulders and hips. “I’m so glad you could come, I really am.” She held the door for me and extended her hand at arm’s length. It was large and cold and moist, and it held on for some time.

I murmured appropriate greetings as I disengaged myself. She led me into her sitting-room and seated me in an armchair.

“I took the liberty of ordering for you,” she said. “They close the kitchens at three. I’m having shirred eggs with those cute little pork sausages they have. I ordered the same for you. Shirred eggs Bercy?”

I said that shirred eggs Bercy sounded delectable.

“Perhaps you’d like something to drink. You’ve had a long hot drive and all on my account. I owe you a nice cool drink.” She was hovering around my chair. She wasn’t built to hover, but she was hovering.

I said that I could do with a bottle of beer.

She went to the phone in a little skipping run that jolted the foundations of the building; turned with her hand on the receiver: “They have some very nice imported Loewenbrau, at least Henry likes it. Dark or light?”

“Dark will be fine.” While she placed the order, I looked around the room for traces of Henry. There were no traces of Henry.

When she returned to her hovering, I asked her: “Where’s your husband?”

Her face arranged itself in a meditative pout. Her large arms hung awkwardly at her sides. I felt a sudden sympathy for her, with a little insight mixed in. Her type had been invented to make men comfortable. Without a man to be nice to, she didn’t know what to do with herself at all. And she was without a man.

I wished I could recall my brusque question and wrap it up in a prettier parcel for her.

She understood the look on my face and answered it along with the question: “I’m glad you brought it up, honestly. It’s what I want to talk to you about, but I hated to broach the subject. I’m an awful dreamer, Mr. Archer. I live in a world of my own unless somebody snaps me out of it like you just did.”

She flung herself on a bright-patterned sofa, which sagged and creaked under her weight. Curiously enough, her legs were good. She arranged them in such a way that I couldn’t fail to notice the slimness of her ankles.

“The dirty bastard picked up and left me,” she said in a deep harsh voice. Her eyes were round with anger, or surprise at her own language. “Good heavens,” she said in her normal voice, “I never swear, honestly.”

“Swear some more. It will probably do you good.”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t.” She had flushed to the ears. But she said: “I call him a dirty bastard because I believe he is one.”

“You’d better go back and take it from the beginning.”

“I hate to. I hate to talk about it, or even think about it. I’ve acted like a great fool. I let him take advantage of me all along the line.”

“Where did you get on?”

“Get on?”

“How did you happen to meet him?”

“Oh,” she said. “He was staying at the guest-ranch near Reno when I was waiting for my divorce. Everything was so romantic, and Henry could ride so well, and his conversation was so interesting. I sort of fell in love with him on the rebound.”

“Rebound?”

“From George, I mean. I was married to George for sixteen years and I guess I got bored with him, or we got bored with each other. It would have been seventeen years this coming June the 10th. We never went anywhere or did anything together any more. All George wanted to do was go out to the country club when he got finished at the office and try to break eighty. I always wanted to come out west but George never took me further than Minneapolis. The only reason we went to Minneapolis was because the business has a branch in Minneapolis. George is the secretary-treasurer of the Simplex Ball Bearing Company.” Pride and resentment and nostalgia warred in her expression. Nostalgia won. “I was a fool to leave him, a great fool, and now I’m having to take my medicine. I walked out on George, now Henry walks out on me. My second marriage lasted sixteen days.” The contrast was too much for her. It brought tears to her eyes, still puffed and red from previous tears.

“Henry walked out on you?”

“Yes,” The syllable lengthened shakily into a sob. “He left this morning, with the car and the money and – everything.”

“After a quarrel?”

“We didn’t even quarrel,” as if Henry had denied her her rightful due. “The police called from Los Angeles early this morning, and Henry answered the telephone, and afterwards he heard me talking to them over the phone. He started packing right away, before I put down the receiver, even. I begged him to tell me what was the matter. He wouldn’t say a word, except that he had to go away on business. He checked out and drove away without even eating breakfast.”

“In your car?”

“I paid for it, only it’s registered in his name. Henry wanted it that way, and he was so masterful, and besides we bought it for our honeymoon. It was really my idea to put it in his name, it made me feel more married.” She hugged her large fine bosom, but there was cold comfort in that.

“You also mentioned money, Mrs. Fellows?”

“Yes.” A nervous hurt plucked at her eyebrows, drawing them closer together. “Please don’t call me Mrs. Fellows. I hate it. Call me Marjorie, or Mrs. Barron.”

“George’s name?”

“Yes.” She managed a weak smile, with tears still standing in her eyes. “George made me a very generous settlement, and I’ve thrown a lot of it away already. Great fool that I am.”

“How much did Henry get into you for?”

“Thirty thousand dollars.” The sound of the numbers seemed to appall her. Unconsciously, she reached for the alligator purse that was lying on the couch beside her, and pressed it to her girdled abdomen. “He said he had a wonderful chance to make a good investment for both of us: this apartment building in Hollywood. He showed me the apartment building, too. Now I guess it’s gone with the wind.”

There was a gentle tapping on the door behind me. She opened it, and an elderly waiter wheeled in our lunch on a cart. While he set the table, Marjorie left the room. She came back in time to tip him heavily, smiling with a washed and reconstructed face. At least Henry hadn’t taken her for all she had, financially or otherwise.

She ate her lunch with appetite, and asked me how I liked mine. I said that the German beer was very good, and that the quality of the shirred eggs Bercy was not strained. I waited until we had lighted cigarettes, and asked her: “What did you say to the police on the telephone this morning? Apparently that’s what frightened Henry off.”

“Do you think so? This Lieutenant Gary wanted to come and talk to me but I explained that I was on my honeymoon and he said he would get in touch with me again and arrange to have me make a deposition, or something of the sort. Then he asked me a lot of questions about Mr. Dalling’s house: what I was doing there and if I found you unconscious, and of course I said I did – and what time it was. Finally he told me that Mr. Dalling was dead, isn’t that dreadful?”

“Dreadful. Did Lieutenant Gary ask you what you were doing at the house when you found me?”

“Yes.”

“What did you tell him?”

“The same as I told you.” She dropped her eyes demurely, and tapped the ash from the end of her cigarette. “That I was just driving by, and saw you lying there on the porch.”

“I think it’s time you told somebody the truth about that.”

She flared up feebly, like a moist firecracker. “How could I tell him the truth? Henry was standing right beside me at the phone, listening to everything I said. I didn’t dare to say a word about my suspicions of him–”

“You’d been having suspicions, then.”

“I was suspicious of Henry from the very beginning, if I’d admitted it to myself. Only he made me feel so good, I couldn’t face up to the facts. I knew he hadn’t much money, and he knew I had. I knew I was foolish to marry again so quickly before I checked his background. But I wanted so hard to believe that he loved me for myself, I deliberately blinded myself and rushed right in. I’d never have given him the thirty thousand if I hadn’t wanted to blind myself. I’m stupid, but I’m not that stupid, Mr. Archer.”

“I doubt that you’re stupid at all,” I said. “You’re too darn emotional, is all. You probably made a mistake divorcing George, but a lot of women make the same mistake. Or else they make the mistake of not divorcing George.”

“You’re an awful cynic, aren’t you? But what you say is perfectly true. I am too emotional. I’m a great emotional fool, and you’ve put your finger on my central weakness. It was my foolish emotions that made me give him the money. I trusted him because I wanted to so badly. I had to trust him to make the whole thing stay real for a little longer. I guess it was slipping already.”

“When was this?”

“Last Thursday, the day after we came here. We were in Santa Barbara at the Biltmore before that. Our week there was a perfect idyll. They have a lovely big pool, and Henry actually taught me how to swim. Henry’s a splendid athlete, and that’s one of the things that appealed to me so much. I love to see a man be able to do things. He told me when he was younger, before he got his wound, that he was a boxing champion in the army.” She noticed that she was softening towards Henry, and caught herself up short, the harsh disgusted note breaking out in her voice again: “I suppose that was a lie, like everything else.”

“His wound?” I prompted her.

“His war wound. He was a colonel in the war, until he was invalided out because of his wound. He was living on his disability pension.”

“Did he ever show you a government check?”

“No, but I know he wasn’t lying about that. I saw the wound.”

“Where was he wounded?”

“In Germany. He fought under General Patton.”

“Not geographically. Physiologically.”

“Oh.” She blushed. “He had a dreadful scar on his abdomen. It still wasn’t completely healed, after all these years.”

“Too bad.”

“That week in Santa Barbara he told me the whole story of his life. But even then I began to have my suspicions. There was this waiter at the Biltmore who knew him. The waiter called him by some other name: apparently he remembered Henry from when he worked at another hotel somewhere. Henry was quite put out. He explained to me that it was a nickname, but I knew waiters don’t address hotel guests by their nicknames, and I wondered about it afterwards.”

“What was the name?”

“It’s queer, I don’t remember. It’ll probably come back, though. Anyway, that was when I started to have my real suspicions of him. Then when we came out here he was always going away, on business he said, and he wouldn’t tell me where he went. On Sunday night we had a quarrel about it. He wanted to go out by himself and I wouldn’t give him the keys to the car, so he had to take a taxi. When the taxi-driver got back to his stand, I tipped him to tell me where he had taken Henry, and he said it was this Mr. Dalling’s house. I waited up for him, but he wouldn’t tell me what he was doing there. The same thing happened Monday night. He went out and I waited and waited, and finally I drove out to the house to look for him.”

“And found me instead.”

“And found you instead.” She smiled.

“But you didn’t tell any of this to Lieutenant Gary.”

“Not a smidgen. I couldn’t, with Henry right there.”

“Are you going to, when you give your evidence?”

“Do you think I should?”

“Definitely.”

“I don’t know.” She pushed her chair back from the table, marched up and down the length of the Indian-patterned rug, her plump hips teetering at the top of her long straight legs. “I don’t know whether I will or whether I won’t. He might have really gone on a business trip, and be coming back tomorrow like he said. Henry’s a strange silent sort of man.”

“He said that, did he, that he’s coming back tomorrow?”

“Something like that. Do you think I should believe him? It would be terrible if this was all a mistake, and I had called the police in, and he really did come back.” She stood facing the door, with a funny look of expectant remorse, as if Henry was there to upbraid her for having disloyal thoughts. “What shall I do, Mr. Archer? It’s taken me a long time to get around to it, but that’s really what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“What do you want to do, get Henry back?”

“No, I don’t think so, even if he would come. I don’t trust him any more, I’m afraid of him. It isn’t only his deception of me. I might be able to forgive that if he came back and proved that he loves me by turning over a new leaf. But I can’t help feeling that he’s mixed up in this terrible murder, that that’s why he rushed away so unexpectedly. You see, I don’t know who he is or what he is.” She sat down on the edge of the couch, suddenly and weakly, as if her legs had given way.

“I have a good idea who and what he is. Did the waiter in Santa Barbara call him Speed?”

Her head jerked up: “Speed! That was it. I knew it would come back to me. How did you guess? Do you know him?”

“By reputation,” I said. “His reputation is bad. He didn’t get his abdominal wound in the war. He got it in a gang fight last fall.”

“I knew it,” she cried, and shook her head from side to side so the bright dyed hair swung forward and brushed her cheeks. “I want to go back to Toledo, where people are nice. I always wanted to live in California but now that I’ve seen it, it’s a hellish place. I’ve fallen among thieves, that’s what I’ve done. Thieves and murderers and confidence men. I want to go back to George.”

“It sounds like a very good plan.”

“I can’t though, he’d never forgive me. I’d be a laughing-stock for the rest of my days. What could I tell him about the thirty thousand? It’s nearer forty when you count the car and all the money I’ve spent.” She kneaded her alligator bag with both clenched hands.

“There’s a possibility you can get it back. You have no notion where Henry went, I don’t suppose.”

“He didn’t tell me anything. He just went away. Now I know I’ll never see him again. But if I ever do, I’ll scratch his eyes out.” Her eyes glared from the ambush of her hair. I didn’t know whether to laugh at her or weep with her.

I looked out the window onto the lawn, where spray from a sprinkling system danced in the sun. “No letters? No telephone calls? No telegrams? No visitors?”

There was a long pause while I watched the dancing water.

“He had a person-to-person call from San Francisco yesterday. I answered the phone myself, then he made me go into the bedroom and close the door. Does that mean anything?”

“It may.” I stood up. “I’ll try it anyway. You got no hint of who was calling, no names given?”

“No.”

“But you’re positive it was a San Francisco call.”

“Oh, yes. The operator said so.” She had pushed back her hair from her face and was looking less upset. There was an ice-chip hardness in her eyes I hadn’t noticed before.

“I ought to tell you, Mrs. Fellows–”

“Mrs. Barron,” she said stubbornly. “I was never really married to him.”

“Mrs. Barron, then. You might get better results if you took your story to the police.”

“I can’t. It would be in all the papers. I could never go home at all then. Don’t you see?”

“If I recover your money, or any part of it, I’ll take a percentage, fifteen percent. That would be forty-five hundred out of thirty thousand.”

“All right.”

“Otherwise I’ll charge you for my expenses and nothing else. I usually work for a daily fee, but this case is different.”

“Why is it so different?”

“I have my own reasons for wanting to talk to Henry. And if I find him, I’ll do what I think best. I’m making you no promises.”