Find a Victim (17 page)

“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 Perdida. 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 tinned 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.

CHAPTER
20
:
I went out after her, down the
veranda steps, across the uncut lawn. She looked back and saw me coming, and started to run. At the edge of the vacant lot her feet got tangled in the rank crabgrass. She fell on her knees and huddled there, her hair veiling her face, her white nape bare to some unknown fatal ax.

I lifted her to her feet and kept one arm around her to steady her. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know. I can’t stay here with him. I’m afraid of him.” Her breasts moved against me like wild things caught in a net. “He’s an evil man, and he hates me. He’s hated us both from the time we were born. I remember the day Anne was born. My mother was dying, but he was angry with her. He wanted a son. He’d be glad to see me dead, too. I was a fool to come back here.”

“Why did you leave your husband, Mrs. Church?”

“He threatened me. He threatened to kill me if I set foot outside his house. But anything would be better than staying here.”

She looked up at the blind house-front and across the vacant lot strewn with its rusty car-frames. Beyond it, in the street, a black sedan turned the corner and stopped at the curb, abruptly. I saw the white Stetson emerge from the driver’s seat.

“Brand.” Her body went soft against my side, as if its bones had dissolved in acid terror.

He came across the vacant lot, walking stiffly on long pistonlike legs. I went to meet him. We faced each other on the narrow path.

“What are you doing with my wife?”

“You’d better ask her.”

“I’m asking you.” His large hands were open at his sides, but they were taut and trembling. “I told you to stay away from her. I also ordered you to drop this case.”

“It didn’t take. I’m on it, and I’m staying.”

“We’ll see about that. If you think you can disregard my orders, push my deputies around, and get away with it—” His teeth bit off the sentence. “I’m giving you a choice right now. Be out of my county in one hour, or stay and face felony charges.”

“The county belongs to you, eh?”

“Stick around and find out.”

“This is where I came in, Church. Every time I run into you, you have a bright new plan for getting me off the case. I’m slow in the mind, but when a thing like this goes on and doesn’t stop, I get a little suspicious. Just a little.”

“I’m not interested in your suspicions.”

“The D.A. ought to be, unless he’s as sour as you are. If your whole county government is sour, I’ll go higher.”

He looked up at the white colloidal sky. “What makes you think you can talk to me like this?”

There was something histrionic in the question. I suspected that his will was bending under pressure, that his integrity was already broken.

“The fact that you’re a phony. You know it. I know it. Your wife knows it.”

A pale line framed his mouth, almost as white and
definite as a chalk line. “Are you trying to force me to kill you?”

“You haven’t the stuff.”

His lips stretched, uncovering his teeth, which glinted with gold souvenirs of childhood poverty. His eyes sank and darkened. I watched them for a signal. They shifted. His right shoulder dropped.

I ducked inside of his swing. His fist went by like a blundering bee, stinging my ear in flight. He staggered sideways off balance, open to a left to the jaw or a right to the middle. I let him have the right. His stomach was like a plank under his clothes. He blocked my left with his right forearm and countered with a left of his own. It caught the side of my head and whirled me around.

Hilda Church was crouched at the edge of the lot like a frightened animal. Her eyes were wide and empty, and her mouth was open in a silent scream.

I turned on Church with my face covered. His fists drove in under my elbows and doubled me over. I came up from underneath with an uppercut that turned his face to the sky. His hat fell off. He staggered backwards a few steps and went down. Rolled over and got up and came at me again.

His long left found my stomach, then my nose. Rain-bowed in my streaming vision, he pivoted from the waist and brought his hooked right over. It chopped me down. I got up onto my knees and felt his fist explode in my face again. It must have opened the gash in my brow. Liquid warmth ran into one of my eyes and turned the daylight red.

I got up and went after him with my head down and bulled inside his left and hammered his body. He dropped his guard. I looped a right at his jaw, felt the pain of the impact electric to my elbow. His dazed profile turned
sideways, nimbused with red. I measured him with my left and put my weight behind a short right hook. He went down with his back against the side of a wheelless T-model.

He was slow getting up this time. His feet dragged in the withered grass. Gravity pulled at his arms. I could have gone over his slipping guard and finished him. Instead I tied him up, partly because he was beaten and partly because the woman cried out behind me:

“Stop it! You have to stop it!”

I held his arms immobilized. His face was like a skull covered with stretched parchment. The scar in his temple was red and beating. He struggled to get loose, closing his eyes in the agony of effort. My blood ran onto him and mixed with his, and I had my first clear thought since the fight began. One of us was going to have to kill the other.

Fury surged through him again. He kneed me and flung himself backwards, out of my hold. He staggered sideways in the weeds, steadied himself on the wheelless car. There was a frozen stillness. I saw Church leaning sleepily on the car-frame, the trees steady in the windless heat, the mountains behind the trees ghostly and two-dimensional in the haze. His hand went to his hip in a jerky mechanical motion.

Fear ran through me like a jagged spark. I had a gun in my pocket. I didnt reach for it. That would be all he needed to make it self-defense. And he was law.

The .45 in his hand dragged him toward me. His slouching silence was worse than any words. If I was going to get it, this was the time and place, under a white valley sky, in the middle of a case I’d never solve. Sweat ran in cold runnels under my clothes, and the drip of blood from my chin counted off the seconds.

The woman stepped around me. “Brand. This man has
been kind to me. He doesn’t mean any harm. Don’t hurt him. Please.”

Her hands reached for the gun and pushed it down. She walked close into him and stood with her face against his shoulder. “Say that you won’t hurt him. Please. There mustn’t be any more killing.”

He looked down at the top of her head as if he had never seen her before. Slowly his eyes focused.

“There won’t be any more.” His voice was deep in his throat. “I came to take you home, Hildie. Will you come home with me?”