Obit Delayed (2 page)

It didn’t matter where the Merryland Ballroom might have been; Merryland Ballrooms were all the same. All had the same blaring bands, the same colored lights, the same smoke and sweat and bouncing bodies. Virginia Wales slipped into the picture as natural as life. Mitch wasn’t one of Pinky’s prize patrons, but a blonde with a smile like Virginia’s had a way of sticking in the memory. The only difficult thing was trying to realize that she was dead.

And now Mitch knew what was happening. He was letting his imagination run away with him; he was working himself into a state of mind where he’d have to leave this air-cooled office and go nosing about, asking questions and making a general nuisance of himself. And all because that clumsy bridegroom in Peter’s appropriated photograph didn’t look lively enough to lift one foot after the other, let alone win a jitterbug contest with his bride! But if he hadn’t danced with his dancing bride, who did? And who danced with her when Frank Wales was no longer about? These were the kind of questions that interested Mitch in his rare moments of curiosity.

Besides, it would be worth a touch of sunstroke just to watch Peter wilt if it turned out that Frank Wales had been visiting a maiden aunt in Azusa.

VALLEY CITY didn’t go in for elaborate municipal buildings. The city hall wouldn’t fool anybody into thinking it was an opera house, and around in back, where they relegated all the old furnishings nobody else wanted, and where the yellow walls of the corridors were just a little dirtier than anywhere else, there was an office door with
Captain Talbot
spelled out in black letters. Mitch could see it from the anteroom as soon as he entered police headquarters. There wasn’t anybody around at the moment except Kendall Hoyt who sat behind a flat-topped desk cleaning his gun. Mitch felt a little peculiar about disturbing him. It was almost like interrupting a man at worship.

“Is Ernie in?” he finally asked, nodding at the frosted-glass panel.

One surly glance was all Hoyt could spare. “He’s in, but he’s busy.”

“With Mrs. Wales?”

“Maybe.”

“Anything new on her missing husband?”

Hoyt shoved a handful of wheat-colored hair out of his eyes and gave the gun a momentary rest. “How should I know?” he muttered. “I’m only patrolling this damn desk. I wanted to go out looking for the guy myself but Ernie says no, so here I sit.”

“Maybe Ernie wants to take Wales alive,” Mitch said.

And maybe some day, if he lived that long, Mitch Gorman would learn not to say the first thing that popped into his head. Hoyt was a sensitive man about some matters, and intimating that he might be a little fast on the draw wasn’t going to encourage co-operation insofar as seeing Ernie was concerned. But Mitch still had his own leg power.

“Hey, you can’t go in there!” Hoyt yelled, but he was wrong, Mitch was already putting Ernie’s door between himself and what could have become a difficult situation. Not that Ernie couldn’t be difficult on occasion, but even in his darkest moods he looked more like an overwrought Kewpie than a tower of wrath.

But Ernie wasn’t in a dark mood at all. Mitch saw that the moment he stepped into the office. His bloodshot eyes were complaining about all that lost sleep, and the seersucker was a lot more wrinkled and sweat-patched than it had been at dawn, but Ernie was wearing a drowsy smile as he rocked back in his wide leather chair and nodded Mitch in.

“I’ve been wondering how long it would take you to show up,” he remarked. “Come on in. I feel very friendly toward the press today.”

Mitch cringed. In a chair opposite Ernie’s desk sat a woman, and her head came up at those words and impaled him with a stare that suggested he’d just walked in with an advanced case of leprosy. Mrs. Wales wouldn’t be sharing that friendly feeling toward the press, that was for sure, and she wouldn’t smile and accept that hand Mitch extended at Ernie’s explanatory introduction. It just hung there, foolish and empty like all his preconceived ideas of Frank Wales’s wife.

He’d been going by a photograph dated 1936. He’d added all the intervening years and then mated Wales to a faded, drab little woman with tear-stained eyes and worried hands. He’d worked up quite a bit of sympathy for this poor soul who had been tricked into placing the finger of suspicion on her husband; but the woman Ernie introduced as Norma Wales wasn’t faded and drab, and if she’d shed any tears they weren’t showing for indignation. Her eyes were clear and unfaltering, and the hand she wouldn’t extend was steady. She couldn’t have been over twenty-five, unless somebody was bottling the fountain of youth, and at a time like this all Mitch could think of was the wonder that a man like Frank Wales could get himself not one but two attractive wives.

But the present Mrs. Wales wasn’t at all like Virginia. She was small and dark, with a close-cropped cap of hair that was the same shade of brown at the roots as at the ends, and if she had a smile it wasn’t showing now.

“I don’t want to talk to any more newspapermen,” she announced firmly. “I talked to one this morning and he’s a liar!”

Mitch could have said much worse about Peter himself, but this was no time to encourage libel. “That’s a pretty strong accusation,” he protested. “Didn’t you tell Mr. Delafield that you came to Valley City in search of your husband?”

Mrs. Wales hesitated. “I didn’t say that he was here. I just thought he might have come here.”

“Why? Did he tell you he was coming here?”

Questions like that weren’t going to win Norma Wales’s friendship, and that was a shame, but Ernie had the answers to fill up the silent spaces. “I’ll tell you why,” he volunteered. “Frank Wales received a special-delivery letter from his ex-wife the night before he left home. He paced the floor all night and then took off in the station wagon next morning without saying where he was going. It’s taken several hours for Mrs. Wales to admit that much, but she did finally.”

“What was in the letter?” Mitch wanted to know.

“She doesn’t know—she says.”

Norma Wales’s eyes came up blazing. “I don’t know! I’m not in the habit of reading my husband’s mail!”

“Then how does anybody know it was from Virginia Wales?” Mitch asked.

“I saw the postmark. My husband doesn’t know anybody else in Valley City.”

“And nobody else in Valley City has been murdered,” Ernie said dryly. “Oh, mind, now, I’m not accusing your husband of killing the woman. I just think it might be interesting to find him and have a little chat.”

No wonder Ernie looked so happy. Now that he was recovering from the initial shock of this unexpected Mrs. Wales, Mitch could see a lot more in her face than just righteous indignation. She was putting up a front. A big, brave front, and Ernie must know it. No woman would chase her husband halfway across the state just because he left home without giving her money for the milkman. And then it occurred to him that her story might be worth listening to if he could talk his way out of Delafield’s doghouse.

“What about that ripped screen?” he demanded suddenly. “If Wales came to see his ex-wife in response to a letter he’d have gone to the door instead of a window. Why, for all we know he may be off on a fishing-trip and doesn’t even know there’s been a murder!”

It was such a noble try, but nothing happened. No bright lights came up in Norma Wales’s eyes; no smile of gratitude or trace of hope. The only smile in the room belonged to Ernie and it wasn’t encouraging.

“I asked the landlady about that screen after you left this morning,” he said. “She says it’s been like that for months.”

“But even so—”

“But even so—what? Look, Mitchell, this is the story. Mr. and Mrs. Wales operate a small motel up on the Redwood Highway. That’s work. With a deal like that you don’t just pick up and go fishing when the busy season’s getting under way. Item two: a station operator in Indio reports gassing up Wales’s station wagon last night about ten-thirty. He was heading this way at the time. Item three: somewhere around midnight, so far as we can tell, Virginia suddenly stopped living. Item four: where is Mrs. Wales’s missing husband?”

“All right!” Mitch interrupted. “All right! Save it for the district attorney!”

Ernie Talbot wasn’t a cruel man. He had a messy murder on his hands and now, unexpectedly, he had a first-class suspect. The combination got him a bit excited, but every statement he made had registered like a slap on Norma Wales’s face. Maybe she wasn’t a faded drab, but she was a woman with troubles and either one of the two was enough to arouse Mitch’s interest. She was a woman with troubles that were just beginning, and one glance at her naked eyes was enough to tell him that she knew that as well as anyone in the room and maybe a lot better. She needed rest and sleep and at least a little hope. But all she got was Ernie’s final blow.

“In any event,” he said, shoving the big chair back from the desk, “we won’t be in doubt long. That dance trophy we found by the body is alive with fingerprints.”

As Ernie had said, that was the story. A few minutes later Mitch was back on the sidewalk where the length of the shadows had begun to suggest that the day might end sometime, and where pedestrians were working up enough interest to hesitate when they passed headquarters and show curious faces. Valley City was going to have a man hunt, a great, wide, man hunt that would alert the border guards, send the sedans of the highway patrol nosing about the roads and byways like so many hunting dogs, and clutter up the air waves with intense and earnest voices. By nightfall everybody in the valley would know enough to bolt the doors, because a desperate killer was at large. A middle-aged, heavy-set man with a receding hairline, a weak mouth, and a pair of sad eyes. You could read all about it on the front page of the papers the delivery boys were tossing on doorsteps all over town.

The way it looked to Mitch, Peter Delafield was due for an uncontested promotion. It was too bad, too, because he’d have liked to do something to encourage Frank Wales’s wife instead of just standing there on the sidewalk and watching Ernie escort her to a room at the El Rey Hotel where she could start getting used to the hell called “waiting.” And then he began to wonder why Frank Wales should come so far to kill a woman he’d been divorced from all these years when he had a wife like that to take her place. Maybe Norma Wales wasn’t as striking as Virginia had been. Maybe she wasn’t so long on personality, but she had a face a man could look at over a breakfast table for a long time without getting restless—which was a very strange thought for Mitch Gorman on a hot afternoon that didn’t seem to be getting any place.

And then Mitch remembered that this wasn’t his baby. It was the stock answer he’d been giving himself for years. If the taxpayers’ money had a way of turning up in strange places, if the news that didn’t get into the paper was a lot more interesting than the news that did, if the world went to hell in a little red wagon—what of it? It wasn’t his baby. The attitude might not solve anything, but at least it kept him out of the ulcer society, and Mitch liked his steaks thick and rare. All of which was a way of reminding himself that he hadn’t broken fast since the last tidbit disappeared from Papa Parsons’s buffet, and that stopping off at a certain Main Street eatery had a more practical aspect than satisfying curiosity.

All you could say for Pinky’s Quick Lunch was that it was handy. The booths that banked one wall of the narrow building hadn’t been painted since hamburger sold for forty cents a pound, and the counter stools seemed to be melting with the heat. But the counter was good enough for Mitch, and, except for some kids having Cokes in the rear booth, he was the only customer in the place.

Behind the counter a lanky lad with a shock of reddish hair jutting up from his head like a stubble field was giving a fair imitation of a man working up to a nervous breakdown. “Shakers, sugar bowls, mustard—everything goes empty at once!” he muttered. “I’m going crazy! I only got two hands!”

Pinky, whose food license read Oscar Kramer, completed this observation with a baleful glare that suggested he hated customers worse than anybody. “Well,” he snapped, “what do you want?”

This approach was never going to get Pinky elected president of the local Jaycee’s, but Mitch shrugged it off. “The next time you pass the grill you might slap on a steak for me,” he said.

“Is that all?”

“No. I could use a cup of coffee—black.”

Pinky looked a little suspicious, but he reached for a cup and saucer. This time yesterday it would have been Virginia drawing that coffee from the urn. Virginia with her flashing smile and gay line of chatter that could make you forget all about the worn paint and lurching stools—sometimes even the cooking. She was beginning to come back to Mitch now. She was beginning to seem real. Then the kids from the back booth began feeding coins into the juke box and everything seemed natural. He couldn’t recall ever coming to Pinky’s but what the music was wailing and Virginia was humming along with it, or maybe stepping out a few beats behind the counter. That was Virginia Wales. A girl who wasn’t as young as she tried to be, but still a plenty good looking female with no visible grief. Her grief had been plenty visible this morning.

“It’s kind of sad when you think about it,” Mitch mused as Pinky slid the cup of coffee across the counter. “Virginia, I mean.”

“Sure, Virginia,” Pinky said. “I knew that’s why you came in here. All day it’s been like this. People I don’t see in a month come piling in to talk about Virginia. French fries or hash-brown?”

“Skip the potatoes. What about Virginia?”

Now Pinky was unhappy again. “How should I know what about her?” He shrugged. “She worked here, that’s all.”

“Did she work yesterday?”

“Five to eight. It don’t pay me to keep open Sundays more than a couple hours in the evening. And if you’re fixing to ask if she had a date afterward save your breath. Virginia didn’t tell me about her love life. I didn’t even know she’d been married until I picked it up on the grapevine this noon.”

There wasn’t anything actually wrong with what Pinky was saying, but it did seem there should be a little remorse for the dead Virginia. A little more regret than the annoyance of having been left shorthanded. Pinky started back to the refrigerator, and then he hesitated and did a fast translation of the expression in Mitch’s eyes.

“It’s not that I don’t feel bad about what happened to her,” he added quickly. “She was a nice kid. I hope they find the guy and boil him in oil. But what can I do about it? I’ve got a business to run!”

There wasn’t anything wrong with Pinky’s logic—only his insistence. But just then the street door swung open and another customer came in to annoy the boss. Sight unseen Mitch felt sorry for him, and swung around to get a look at the next victim of Pinky’s frazzled nerves. That’s when all the trouble began.

Dave Singer was one of Valley City’s most prominent citizens—you could ask Kefauver. He was a dapper young man in a baggy sport coat and pale-blue slacks, and the sight of his too-perfect profile gave Mitch a start. Dave seemed a little out of place in a downtown hash house, but there was nothing self-conscious in the way he threw a leg over one of the lopsided stools and reached for a menu.

“Where is everybody?” he demanded. “How about a little service?”

Pinky was going to love this boy. “Been out of town?” he asked.