Meet Me at the Morgue (21 page)

She waited a long time before replying. Her oiled face was like a mask gleaming metallically in the sun. “I thought you were my friend.”

“I’m trying to be.”

“By making covert accusations against me? Is that what you call friendship?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve got to either clear Miner, or pin the kidnapping on him. I feel an obligation towards the law, the truth, whatever you want to call the abstractions that keep us going, keep us human. There’s nothing personal in this.”

“Obviously there isn’t. I don’t suppose you’ll take my word that I’ve done nothing wrong?”

“Not on a blanket denial, no. I’d like something more specific.”

“All right then, fire away, and make it fast. I don’t want Jamie to hear his mother being cross-questioned.”

“You’re making it difficult for me.”

“I hope so, Mr. Cross. First of all, you’ll naturally want to know how long and how well I knew this chap Kerry Snow.”

“You’ve asked the question. Will you answer it?”

“I answered it this morning, to the F.B.I. That tale-bearing little wretch of a Larry Seifel—” She broke off. “All I can tell you is the truth. I never heard of Kerry Snow until Fred Miner gave me his name. It was in January 1946, I believe,
a Monday morning. Fred was ambulatory by then. He’d had a weekend convalescent leave, and he came back to the hospital in a bad mental condition, at least it seemed so to me. I asked him what the trouble was. He wouldn’t tell me, of course—he never has—but he made me promise to do something for him. He gave me this man’s name, and his address in Los Angeles, and asked me to pass the information on to the F.B.I. I said I would. All it amounted to was phoning Larry Seifel down at District headquarters.”

“Did you know Seifel well?”

“We’d gone dancing a few times. Is it important, in the
abstract?
”

“What about Miner?”

“What about him? He was my patient. I liked him. I always have, until yesterday.”

“Did he tell you what Snow was wanted for?”

“I think he mentioned desertion. I got the impression that he’d run across Snow by accident, over the weekend, and recognized him as a wanted man. They served on the same ship, didn’t they?”

“Yes. You say you never met Snow, or heard of him before that?”

“I not only say it. It’s the truth.”

“I believe you.”

“You are too kind.”

“There’s still another point that needs to be cleared up.”

She sighed. “There would be. But go ahead.”

“I’m not sure I can explain it properly. Kerry Snow left a girl behind him, a young creature named Molly Fawn who claims to be his widow.”

“Do you distrust all widows?”

“Please,” I said. “I’m trying to do my job.”

“I’m trying to survive.”

“Shall I drop it for now?”

“No, let’s get it over with.” She smiled bleakly. “You have that abstract gleam in your eyes. Follow the gleam. I can take it, I hope.”

“According to Molly Fawn,” I said, “Snow spoke of a woman who had betrayed him to the police in 1946. Could you be that woman?”

“I don’t see how. How would he know of my part in it?”

“Miner might have told him, or Seifel.”

“Why should they?”

“I don’t know. I do know this: After Lemp was hired by your husband to … observe your movements—”

“To spy on me,” she emended.

“Lemp went back to Los Angeles and told Kerry Snow that he had located the woman.”

“The woman who had him arrested?”

“Yes. That seems to be what brought Snow here to Pacific Point: the hope of finding the woman and getting back at her in some way.”

“And you think I’m that woman?”

“I don’t think anything.”

“Then why have you been asking me these questions?”

“I was hoping to learn something useful.”

“About me?”

“About the case in general. After all, you
are
connected with it. You did have a hand in Kerry Snow’s arrest. Your chauffeur murdered Snow.”

“It’s murder now, is it?”

“Apparently. And your son was kidnapped by Snow’s crony.”

“Anything else?” she cried, a little wildly.

“Yes, there is one other thing. According to Molly Fawn, the woman Snow was looking for had red hair.”

She lay back in her chair like a fighter after a hard round, and spoke with her face averted:

“You disappoint me, Mr. Cross. I gave you credit for some intelligence. If you can’t see that I’m an innocent woman, you are a stupid man.”

“You’re not the red-headed woman in the case, then?”

“I have red hair, I can’t deny that. Everything else I deny.”

“All right.”

“It’s not all right. I’ve tried to be decent all my life. I think I deserve to be trusted. When I learned yesterday that Abel didn’t trust me, he lost his meaning for me. I no longer cared for him. I feel no sorrow for him.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I suppose I’m oversuspicious. It’s an occupational disease in law-enforcement work.”

“I’m sorry, too.” She would not look at me.

The boy called from the doorway: “Mummy! Is the argument over? I’m ready to come out now.”

“Come on then,” she said brightly. “Mr. Cross is just about to leave.”

CHAPTER
25
:
      
I drove home to my walkup
apartment. Emptying the pockets of my trousers, I found that I had kept the keys to the desert house and the keys to the Lincoln. Oddly enough, I liked the idea of having them. I went to bed.

When I woke up there was still light in the window, a sunset light burning like a grate fire behind the Venetian blind. I had been dreaming. I couldn’t remember the dream distinctly, but it had left a pattern in my consciousness. An insistent bell had been ringing at the end of a corridor. The corridor was both spatial and temporal. Along its echoing span, a man was running with a boy in his arms. I was the running man, and the boy in my arms was Jamie.

My thoughts were instantaneous, as immediate as sensations. The bell rang again. I reached for the telephone that had awakened me:

“This is Cross.”

“Forest. We’ve traced Arthur Lemp back from San Francisco. Miss Devon thought you’d be interested.”

“I’m interested.”

“You sound sleepy.”

“I just woke up. But I can listen.”

“The name he started out with was George Lempke. His father was a German immigrant, an ironworker in Pittsburgh. The son won a college scholarship and worked his way through law school. He was commissioned a second looie in the first war. After the war he practiced in Chicago, and did fairly well for a short while. Then he was caught suborning a witness to perjure himself in a murder trial. He served two years in Joliet, and of course the state association disbarred him. After that he was committed to a mental hospital—”

“A disbarred lawyer?” I said. “Committed to a mental hospital?”

“That’s what I said. He must have sprung himself out of it in pretty good time. He showed up in San Francisco in 1922, using the name of Arthur Lemp.”

I lost track of what Forest was saying. The dream came flooding back into my mind. The running man was Lemp as well as myself, and the boy in his arms with the man’s face was Seifel.

“Have you tracked down any of his relatives?”

“Not yet. His parents are dead. He had a wife at one time, but she didn’t stay with him long.”

I see.

“Did the D.A. get in touch with you, by the way?”

“What about?”

“He’s convening the Grand Jury tomorrow morning. I lit a small fire under him. You’re slated to be the first witness.”

“All right. Thanks. Good-bye.”

I showered and dressed. My hands were overeager. I never did get the collar of my shirt buttoned.

That, and the fact that I hadn’t shaved, were the first things Mrs. Seifel noticed. She came to the door of her suburban ranch-house, faultlessly groomed in a dark silk frock pinched very thin at the waist. Her black eyes examined me thoroughly, and showed no warmth:

“I know you, don’t I?”

“We met yesterday. I’m Howard Cross, County Probation Officer.”

“I am Florabelle Seifel. If you’re looking for Lawrence, he’s not here. I don’t know whether to expect him for dinner or not, thanks to you.”

“Thanks to me?”

“Thanks to your secretary, I should say. It’s very apropos that you should come here this evening. I’ve been wishing to speak to you. This nonsense between my son and your secretary has gone far enough.”

“Miss Devon is my assistant, and it’s not exactly nonsense. But that’s beside the point.”

“It’s very much
to
the point. You’re a public official, and you have some responsibility. It seems to me that your employees should be indoctrinated with some sense of class distinction. I’m not without power in this community, and when I see my son inveigled into a relationship with a social inferior—”

“I didn’t come to discuss that with you.”

“What then did you come to discuss with me?” She tilted her sleek black head and looked at me with hostility.

Her eyes were hard and black, impervious. It had probably
been years since they had seen anything in the outside world that they hadn’t wished to see. Her self-assurance was almost paranoiac.

“Your husband, Mrs. Seifel. Mrs. Lempke.”

The change in her face was sudden and terrible. The mouth opened, ringed with white teeth, in a silent snarl of pain. The eyes narrowed to glimmering slits. The flesh crumpled. She said in an old hoarse voice:

“Go away. You’ve only come here to torment me.”

“Not at all. I want the truth. I’ll keep it to myself if I can.”

“I’ll kill myself. I can’t bear the shame.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t,” she said. “I’ve made a good life for Lawrence and myself. I refuse to see it end, and go on living.”

“It’s good for you, perhaps.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing.”

She was leaning in the opening, holding herself upright with one hand on the doorknob. The last of the sunset shone on her face like light from a distant fire.

“I suppose you intend to come in,” she said.

“It might be more comfortable for both of us.”

“Come in then.”

The house had an artificial beauty, like its owner. She led me into a glass-sided sitting-room that overlooked a flower garden, almost colorless in the dying light. The white carpet looked as if it had never been violated by a human foot. A Matisse odalisque reclined in an ivory frame above a white chaise longue. The pose that Mrs. Seifel assumed in the chaise was an imitation, conscious or unconscious, of the odalisque’s. It added a final touch of unreality.

“Sit down, Mr. Cross,” she said wearily. “I understood you
to say a moment ago that you intend to keep this matter quiet.”

“I will if I can.”

“What does that mean?”

“If you or your son are involved in these crimes in any way, obviously the facts have to be brought out.”

“Involved in crimes? The very idea is ridiculous, outrageous.” She scratched with carmine nails at her throat, the weak spot in her illusion.

“The facts are outrageous,” I said.

“Are they not? The most outrageous of all is the fact that you can’t get away from the past. It’s built into one’s life. You can’t wall it off or deny it or evade it or undo it. It’s inescapably and inevitably there, like a deformed child in a secret room of one’s house. How I’ve paid for my foolishness.”

“Foolishness?”

“In marrying George Lempke, against my parents’ wishes. I was just twenty, and a very spoiled young girl. I met him at a sorority ball in Champaign. He was handsome and charming—my story is quite banal, isn’t it?—and a returned war hero. Any young officer was a war hero in those days, if he had actually crossed the Atlantic Ocean. I fell in love, and married him. A few months after my child was born he was arrested and sent to jail. My father arranged a divorce, and I thought I was rid of George, free to raise my child in peace. But when he was released he found us again. He came to the apartment in my absence and stole Larry from me. They were missing for four days, living in a wretched hotel on the south side. Those were the most dreadful days of my life. My father hired the Pinkerton organization, and finally they caught him. Larry was safe.”

“What happened to your husband—your ex-husband?”

“We had him put away. In order to avoid publicity—my father was a leading figure on La Salle Street in those days—father had him committed to a state hospital. Unfortunately they let him go within a year.”

“Was he insane?”

“How could there be any question about it? Of course he was insane, criminally insane. A man who would kidnap his own three-year-old son, such a man—” Her voice broke off in a harsh discord. Her hand went to her throat again, kneading the loose flesh between the red-tipped fingers.

“Maybe he simply wanted his son to be with him.”

“If he had wanted that, he could and should have led an upright life in the first place. He was unfaithful to me before Larry was born. George Lempke was never anything but an evil man.”

“I suppose you know what he did yesterday.”

“I know. I realized when Larry described the man he had seen in the mortuary. George came to me back in November, you see. Somehow he’d discovered that we were living here and sought us out. I suppose he thought that he could get some money out of me. I told him flatly that if he ever approached me or my son again, I’d have him jailed.”

“Does Larry know that?”

“Certainly not. We never discuss his father. I explained the situation to Larry when he was a boy. Neither of us has ever mentioned it since.”

“And he doesn’t know that the man is his father?”

“Not from me. Can I depend on you not to tell him?”

“It might be good for him to know.”

“Good? How could it benefit anyone to rake up those dreadful things?”

“It’s on his mind,” I said. “He told me about his father yesterday, as much as you’d let him know. I think he may
have recognized the dead man, more or less unconsciously.”

“Impossible. He was only three when he last saw his father.”