Obit Delayed (5 page)

“Is he supposed to be?”

“I don’t know. I’m just asking.”

“I get it, the inquiring reporter. Answer the man’s questions and you’ll get your picture in the paper.” Rita’s eyes narrowed. It wasn’t easy, but they narrowed. “Thanks just the same,” she said, “but I’ve already had my picture in the paper.”

“I know.” Mitch smiled. “That’s one of the reasons I think you’re going to invite me in for a chat.”

The door had been steadily closing but Rita wasn’t that dumb. There wasn’t too much a paper could work up indignation over without stepping on important toes, but she was vulnerable. The Ritas of the world were always vulnerable. There was no sense in deliberately courting trouble. So Mitch walked into an apartment that could have used a good housekeeper and a couple of interior decorators. The divan needed upholstering and somebody had upset an ash tray on the rug. The bedroom door was open, displaying a recently vacated bed and a row of stockings drying on a line in the bathroom beyond, and off to the left in what must be the kitchen a faucet was dripping noisily. The whole place gave the impression that somebody had slapped controls on the wages of sin.

“Satisfied?” Rita challenged, when Mitch had seen everything he could see from that divan. “Now, what is all this with Davey?”

So it was Davey. Mitch made a mental note of this interesting disclosure. It tallied with the way she’d been hanging on his arm last night.

“I want to ask him a question,” he said.

“What question?”

“I want to ask him who killed Virginia Wales.”

“I thought everybody knew.”

“Everybody thinks they know.”

“Except you.”

“Except me and Dave Singer. You were at the bar last night. You heard what I said.”

“And I saw what Dave did! Listen, Mr. Gorman—” Rita sat down on one arm of the divan and crossed her legs in a way that didn’t make listening any easier—”if I was you I wouldn’t talk so much in crowded places.”

“It’s not crowded here,” Mitch suggested. “You seem close to Dave. I can’t help thinking that you would know all about it if he’d been making a play for a pretty waitress.”

The lighter Rita picked up from a side table burned quite a while before she remembered the cigarette in her other hand. Maybe it was just the reflected flame that brightened her eyes. “Virginia Wales!” she scoffed. “What would Dave want with her? She was no debutante!”

“That’s right, she wasn’t,” Mitch mused. “She was an old hag of thirty-one, five foot six, one hundred and twenty-five pounds distributed in the right places, and a smile that could bowl a man over from across a crowded room. I’ll bet she was a mess in an evening gown.”

He’d painted the picture in glorious Technicolor and Rita wasn’t blind. The hand holding the cigarette was shaking now, and that wasn’t firelight in her eyes. “You’re crazy!” she shrieked. “Dave wasn’t hanging around her because of that! She was nothing to him!”

“Then why was he hanging around her?”

The place, the mood, and the moment were just right for an answer to that question. Rita was on her feet with her mouth half open—and then the phone started screaming and the moment was gone. Mitch didn’t need an extension to know what that call was about. Herbie and Vince must have had time to compare notes, and somebody was reminding Rita that she didn’t know anything at all.

THREE TRIES and three misses, not an impressive score to take back to a worried woman in her own private cell at the El Rey Hotel. Nothing, surely, to take to Ernie Talbot and say, “Look, friend, you’re on the wrong track!” At the moment Mitch’s track didn’t even have rails, but he remembered something about the wicked fleeing where no man pursueth and it seemed appropriate.

Meanwhile, the fast express Peter Delafield was engineering tore along at full speed.

“Pete’s made the wire service!” Lois announced the moment Mitch hit the office. “Isn’t that grand?”

“Ducky!” Mitch muttered. “Where is the V.I.P.?”

Lois never had a chance to answer because at that moment Peter himself came in from the pressroom, his sleeves rolled up and a steely glint in his blue eyes. All he needed was an eyeshade.

“Oh, there you are,” he called. “Mr. Parsons phoned a little while ago. I had to tell him you were out.”

Mitch could tell that duty just about broke Peter’s heart. “Was he unhappy?” he asked dryly.

“Not at all. He congratulated me on the way I’m handling the Wales story. Colorful, he said. Readers like colorful coverage.”

“Especially the color of blood,” Mitch murmured. “Anything new?”

Peter’s face clouded. Events weren’t moving fast enough to suit him, but the boy was imaginative. “I’ve been digging up some background on Frank and Virginia,” he said. “They lived here before the war, you know—right in that same house where she was killed. He moved north and she stayed on. I wonder if it was sentimental attachment.”

“From the looks of the place I’d say it was more apt to be financial embarrassment,” Mitch opined, but Peter wasn’t interested.

“Frank was a migratory worker, away from home most of the time. Nobody seems to remember much about him, but everybody knows about Virginia. She must have been quite a gal. Come to think of it, the present Mrs. Wales isn’t bad, either, is she?”

There was something a little more sickening than usual about Peter’s smile. That was the trouble with small towns, everybody knew every move you made. And that fracas at the Club Serape hadn’t been the best way to keep a date with Norma Wales confidential.

“I couldn’t say,” Mitch growled. “I’m not an authority.” He was still nursing a slow burn when he sought the sanctuary of his plywood corner, but that effort was as futile as everything else he’d tried all day. The Duchess was there waiting for him with questions poised.

“Well, what about it?” she demanded.

Mitch sat down at his desk and stared dully at the pile of assorted debris that had accumulated in his absence. “What about what?” he countered, and The Duchess wrinkled her nose.

“The great woman hunt, of course! Did you find her?”

“I found her.”

“So?”

As much as he loved The Duchess, and there were times when she was all in the world he did love, Mitch had a great urge to shout her out of the office; but then he looked up and caught the button-bright expectancy in her eyes, and it reminded him of a fat Pekinese he’d once seen begging for a handout. He couldn’t shout at the Pekinese because it would have been cruelty to animals, and he couldn’t shout at The Duchess because she might bite.

“It was only a social call,” he said.

“The hell it was! Don’t lie to me, Mitch Gorman. I’m the veteran of three marital campaigns. Just where does Rita Royale fit into this Wales case?”

“What makes you think she does?” Mitch asked.

“A shiftless editor I know who wouldn’t walk across the room if he could get someone to carry him. You’ve worked up a sweat today. That must mean something. Now let’s see—” The Duchess whipped out a pair of tortoise-rimmed glasses and began to study a little notebook she’d been clutching all this time. “Rita Royale,” she read aloud, “alias Rita Romaine, alias Rosie Romano. Three arrests on suspicion of offering: no convictions; one arrest on suspicion of possession of narcotics: no conviction; one arrest on suspicion of possession of marijuana: case now pending.”

“No conviction,” Mitch muttered.

“Apparently the gal has friends,” The Duchess agreed. “Which brings us to the colorful career of Dave Singer—”

“All right, I give up,” Mitch said. He grinned across the desk, and The Duchess yanked off her glasses. This woman didn’t live in a vacuum. She’d heard about last night, too, and it wouldn’t do any harm to recruit an ally—or at least try out a theory for reaction. He related yesterday’s incident at Pinky’s, explained the cause of the scuffle at the Club Serape bar, and wound up with a quick briefing on the futile search for Dave Singer. The Duchess followed every word, her head cocked sideways and her dark eyes alert.

“Put them all together and they spell murder,” she murmured at the finish. “But why? Why should anybody in Dave Singer’s weird world do our little waitress in?”

Mitch shook his head. “If I knew that I’d be talking to Ernie Talbot instead of to you,” he said. “But that case history on Rita that you just rattled off reminded me of something. Dave Singer served time a few years ago. Does that little notebook tell you why? No, don’t bother,” he added quickly, as she reached for her glasses again, “I know. Dave was caught pushing narcotics back in his freelancing days. That taught him a lesson and he joined Costro’s country club.”

“I’m following,” The Duchess said, “but I don’t know where I’m going.”

She didn’t have anything on Mitch there. The idea was vague and nebulous, but it had something to do with what Norma Wales had said, and what Mrs. Molina had said, and what Mitch remembered of the cluttered bedroom and the death of a laughing blonde. Virginia Wales hadn’t been a kid any more. Those dancing feet had traveled a long way, and sooner or later they would get tired.

… time enough to sit home when I’m old and ugly
. Mrs. Molina’s testimony came back to mind, and the words were proof enough that Virginia knew time was her enemy. So you take another drink for an extra lift. You light up another cigarette, and maybe it isn’t a standard brand. You reach for anything at all to steal a few more years. It was only conjecture, but it could be.

“I once had a Kerry blue that looked just the way you do now,” The Duchess remarked. “I had to have him put away.”

“I was thinking,” Mitch explained. “Last night Mrs. Wales told me there was no romantic attachment between her husband and his first wife, but that he felt a sense of responsibility for her. He worried about her welfare.”

The Duchess’s eyebrows were at a ridiculous angle, but she made no comment.

“Last fall Virginia became ill and wrote for help. Frank Wales paid the bills.”

“Mrs. Wales must have loved that!”

“She didn’t say, and it doesn’t matter. What interests me is the nature of Virginia’s illness.”

The Duchess was wonderful at addition. She had all those facts on Dave Singer and Rita Royale, and she had a murdered waitress with an unidentified ailment. “I knew something was simmering on the back burner!” she declared. “Would you like me to slip into an apron and start stirring?”

“Would you know where to stir?”

“I think so. First of all, we want to know if Virginia was ever on the junk. Right?”

“I suppose so. I don’t know what the connection is, but there has to be one. There has to be some link between Virginia and Dave Singer, or somebody bigger than Singer whom he can identify but doesn’t dare. Somebody’s scared. I don’t know what of or why, but they’re scared.”

Mitch puzzled over it through a short silence, and then looked up to see The Duchess waiting for her answer.

“All right, get mixed up in this mess if you like,” he said. “But watch yourself. This doesn’t come under the heading of social activities you know. The landlady, Mrs. Molina, might be a good place to start asking questions. She strikes me as being a kind soul who might carry a hot bowl of soup to a sick tenant.”

But The Duchess didn’t wait around for instructions. Mitch was talking to himself after the first few words, and then he was alone with nothing but Peter’s front page to keep him company. The boy had real talent. The headline said nothing in the most provocative manner:
Police Tighten Net in Wales Search
.

Nobody was going to ask his opinion, but Mitch was beginning to suspect they might do better with a shovel.

IT WAS ALMOST EIGHT before Mitch caught up on the day’s work he hadn’t done and headed for the El Rey. He wasn’t in much of a hurry anyway. That question-and-answer game could mean a lot or nothing at all, but it wasn’t the kind of story to bring out the stars in Norma Wales’s eyes. She was expecting big things from Mitch Gorman, and for some reason he hated to see that expectation fade. So he drove very slowly toward the big white building with the canopied entrance. Main Street was already dark, and overhead a lopsided moon had added a little girth since last night—all the better for hunting a man wanted for murder. But the master of the hunt didn’t seem much impressed with the moonlight.

Ernie Talbot was slouched behind the steering-wheel of his new four-thousand-dollar sedan when Mitch nosed the coupé into the next parking-space. The curbing in front of the El Rey. Hotel wasn’t Ernie’s usual habitat, but he seemed comfortable enough.

“Hi, Mitch,” he called, as Mitch stepped out of the coupé. “What’s news?”

It was the standard greeting he’d been kicking around for years but Mitch hadn’t laughed for a long time. “How should I know?” he retorted. “You’re sitting on all the news these days.”

“Sitting?” Ernie’s huge shoulders shook with silent laughter. “Well, it’s safe to say anything I sit on’s bound to hatch out big,” he said. “But from what I hear you have a little something in the nest, too. What is it tonight, chapter two of Mrs. Wales’s personal memoirs?”

There it was again. One evening in the woman’s company and the whole town was buzzing. “And why not?” Mitch bristled. “Is she incommunicado?”

“Hell, no! Go ahead and have fun.”

Ernie waved Mitch on with one pudgy hand and sank back against the upholstery. Why he was parked there, and what he was waiting for, were a couple more items for Mitch to add to his collection of puzzles. Ernie wasn’t giving anybody anything.

But Norma Wales wasn’t having fun, that was for sure. She greeted Mitch like a rich relative come to pay off the mortgage, and listened with hungry eyes while he tried to make a big production out of all the zeros he’d accumulated in place of answers. And he couldn’t mention that theory about Frank Wales’s prolonged absence. With all the time and solitude she had for waiting and worrying Norma must have faced every possible fear by this time.

“But couldn’t the police find Singer?” she asked hopefully. “Couldn’t they make him tell whatever he knows?”

The police. Mitch crossed over to the window and looked down on the street he’d just left. Ernie was still sitting in the sedan, but now he’d been joined by a plainclothes man named McMahon who was hanging over the car door like a teen-ager at a curbstone convention. “The police have other irons in the fire,” Mitch replied. “I can’t see Ernie Talbot working up much enthusiasm for the little we’re going on.”

“He’s certainly not lacking enthusiasm for the little he’s going on,” Norma said bitterly. “He was here again today to ask more questions about my husband—and such interesting questions! Had he ever acted strangely? Had he ever suffered a nervous breakdown or any mental disorder? Apparently Frank’s supposed to be a homicidal maniac out to kill off the women in his life!”

That was more than just anger in Norma’s voice. Her eyes were a bit too bright and her voice a little too loud. She joined Mitch at the window and stared ruefully at the street scene below. “Look at them,” she said. “Waiting like vultures!”

“Ernie’s desperate for a motive,” Mitch suggested. “Don’t let talk like that upset you.”

“But it does! Suppose talk like that gets around. Suppose everybody gets to suspecting Frank of something like that and then he’s seen somewhere. Do you think I relish the idea of my husband being shot down like a mad dog?”

“That’s hardly likely—”

“And why not? Everything that’s happened is hardly likely, but it’s happened!”

Norma turned away from the window and began to pace the floor. How many hours she’d been doing that only God could tell, but Mitch could imagine. He wanted to come up with some conclusive argument to blast her fears, but what she’d just said had caught him off base. He started out doubting Frank Wales’s guilt because there was no motive, but sometimes there didn’t have to be a motive. And then Mitch realized what he was doing. One suggestion and he was suspicious—no wonder she was afraid! Imagine the headline Peter could come up with if he got wind of Ernie’s angle!

“I’ve been followed and watched all day,” Norma said. “Everywhere I go they’re watching. To the drugstore, to the dining-room, and you should have seen the interest when I went to the bank to cash a check! Late this afternoon I tried taking a walk—I was going to your office to find out what you’d learned—but I had to give it up. There was a dark, shabby, little man who kept tagging my heels all the way. Can’t you see, Mr. Gorman? We’ve got to do something!”

Mitch could see, all right. A little more of this waiting and Norma Wales would be seeing little green men with pink eyes. Even a wild-goose chase was better than wringing the skin off your hands.

“Let’s get out of here!” he announced abruptly. “I’ve just thought of another place Dave might be, and if Ernie wants to play games we’ll give him a real run for his money!”

By the time Mitch and Norma reached the street Ernie had collected quite a following. In addition to McMahon, Kendall Hoyt’s one-man prowl car had joined the party, and the three of them were having some very serious conversation that stopped abruptly when Mitch helped Norma into the coupé. It was a shame to spoil the boys’ fun, Mitch decided.

“You needn’t wait up for us,” he called cheerfully. “I’m taking Mrs. Wales down to Mexicali for the evening.”

“Souvenir-hunting?” Hoyt suggested.

“Not exactly. Confidentially, she’s got her husband hidden out in a marijuana patch and we’re bringing him some clean socks.”

A new topic of conversation was just what the party needed, and Mitch was grinning wickedly as he drove away.

A border town collects crowds like a two-dollar window at the race track. It would have been worse on a Saturday night, but every night is Saturday to tourists and that was Mexicali’s specialty. It was a place where pink-faced men from the Middle West could get their first (and probably last) taste of tequila while their wives filled the back seat of the sedan with a lot of trinkets they’d never know what to do with when they got home. It was a place where the highway became a narrow, crowded street and the most essential part of an automobile was the horn.

But Mitch wasn’t taking Norma sight-seeing. They weren’t going to take snapshots, buy souvenirs, or look for quaint eating-places, because the only place in Mexicali big enough and loud enough for Dave was a night club that belonged to Vince Costro even if his name wasn’t on the lease. “The place seems kind of empty tonight,” Mitch murmured, as they elbowed through the doorway. The floor show was just getting under way with a band that sounded like a boiler factory plus maracas, and the crowd at the entrance had just wandered in to see what all the noise was about. Once inside it was no trick to find a table, especially one off in the corner where they could watch everybody without being noticed.

The table was small with a tiny lamp that pricked feebly at the darkness ringing the stage. “I should have brought my boy scout flash,” Mitch muttered. “They might at least provide flares to send up for a waiter.”

“Let’s just sit and watch,” Norma suggested. “Do you really think Dave Singer might be here?”

“It’s possible,” Mitch conceded, and she grew thoughtful. “From what you’ve told me about Singer and Costro and that woman, they sound like criminals,” she said. “I don’t understand how Virginia could have been mixed up with people like that.”

“I thought you didn’t know her.”

“I didn’t, but Frank did. She wasn’t like that. He said she liked running around and having fun with young kids—that’s one of the reasons they couldn’t get along. Frank just isn’t the bobby-sox type. It was silly, maybe, but hardly sinister.”

“People change,” Mitch reminded. “In three years’ time they can change a lot. Which reminds me, I was going to ask you about that illness of Virginia’s. Maybe you can tell me—”

When the band was playing Mitch had to yell to make himself heard, but when it suddenly stopped he felt a little foolish. Forms stirred in the darkness, and shadows with faces turned around to stare. “At least now somebody knows we’re here.” Mitch grinned. “Maybe we’ll attract a waiter.”

“We’ve attracted something,” Norma observed, “but I’m not sure what.”

Mitch looked up to see a wide grin at his elbow. Then the grin acquired a face and a form attired in a long tailed blouse and a jaunty beret. “Portrait of the lady, señor? In a few moments I can capture her beauty forever.”

Such a pitch deserved consideration. And even if it hadn’t, there wasn’t much to be done when the young man pulled up an extra chair, set up his sketch pad on the table, and began measuring Norma’s face with an outthrust crayon.

“How can you capture anybody’s beauty in the dark?” Mitch demanded, and the wide grin returned.

“A beautiful lady, señor, gives off a radiance of her own. However, if you’re not using this—” A flick of the lamp shade brought Norma’s face out of the shadows. The light was kind. It brought out her eyes and softened her mouth until those tight little worry lines didn’t show at all. She started to protest, but the young man’s fingers were already flying over the sketch pad and it was just the kind of diversion needed to shake the ghost of a bad day. When a whispering tenor with a background of guitars took over on the bandstand even Mitch began to feel mellow.

But this woman was Frank Wales’s wife. That didn’t make any more sense than the pair of mismates in that 1936 wedding picture, because Frank hadn’t found a gold mine and operating a motor court was no life of leisure. Mitch could picture Norma in plaid shirt and Levi’s, with her days full of laundry lists and a night life consisting solely of late tourists who couldn’t read the “No Vacancy” sign, and the thought made him melancholy. But it was security, a thing women prize highly. It
was
security—but not since Virginia lost her trophy in the finals.

“How about a portrait of the gentleman for the lady?”

The sketch artist worked too fast. Mitch was just getting interested in his reverie when the boy fired the question. He was already scratching a hen-track signature in the lower corner of the finished sheet.

“The lady doesn’t want a portrait of the gentleman,” Mitch growled.

“You haven’t asked her, señor.”

“I know without asking. And you can drop that ‘señor’ business, Joe. Ruiz, isn’t it? Valley City High, class of ‘51.”

The grin came back wider than ever. “Not so loud,” the boy cautioned, “you’ll ruin my business. I couldn’t get four bits for a sketch in Valley City.” Then he sobered and squinted at Mitch from across the shadowed table. “Now I know you,” he said. “You run that newspaper in Valley City that didn’t need a cartoonist last year.”

“That’s right. What do I owe you?”

“You don’t need a cartoonist again this year, I suppose?”

“Right again.”

“In that case—two dollars.”

Mitch was reaching for his billfold when he caught hold of an idea. Ruiz hadn’t just wandered into the club. He must work the place regularly like the camera girls up north, and know the more colorful patrons by sight. “How would you like to try for five?” he suggested. “Do you know Dave Singer?”

“I’ve seen him a few times,” Ruiz admitted.

“Recently?”

Ruiz was gathering up his equipment, but the bill in Mitch’s hand seemed to fascinate him. “What is all this about Singer?” he puzzled. “I haven’t seen him for weeks, but there’s a tanked-up blonde at the bar asking the same questions. You two should get together.”

The suggestion alone was worth the five dollars.

It had to be Rita. Rita had a weakness for both Dave Singer and liquor, and couldn’t seem to hold either one. She was putting up a losing battle with some horrible concoction in a frosted beaker when Mitch appropriated the next stool and invaded her solitude. “Mind if I buy the next round?” he suggested.

The words were all right, but she seemed to resent the company. “Get lost!” she said.

“Like Dave?” Mitch queried.

“What makes you think Dave’s lost?”

“He must be. You’re looking for him and I’m looking for him. Either he’s lost or we are.”

Mitch wasn’t really prepared for the response to this observation. Rita’s mood changed abruptly. She tossed back her head, emitting a rather frightening sound that must have been laughter, and then grabbed his arm with an exuberance that almost jerked him off the bar stool. “You know,” she babbled into his collar, “you’re a very funny man. You’re cute, too.”

“Thank you,” Mitch said. “It’s been a long time since anyone called me cute.”

“That’s because you’re so unfriendly. Why don’t you be nice to Rita? Rita gets lonely!”

“With Davey away, you mean.”

“Davey!”

Mitch had said the wrong thing—or the right one, depending on the point of view, because Rita immediately turned loose the grip on his arm and went back to work on the glass again. When she looked up another mood had taken over. She wore a vague smile and a look of cunning in her bloodshot eyes.

“Still trying to pump me about Dave, aren’t you?” she said. “Still trying to find out what he was doing at Pinky’s.”

“Aren’t you?”

“I know what he was doing there—and I’m not telling you! Rita’s not opening her mouth!”

“Then I guess I’m wasting my time,” Mitch conceded. “But at least I know he wasn’t there to see Virginia. You did tell me that much this afternoon.”

“I did?” Rita frowned thoughtfully, but she was in no condition to remember details. “Well, maybe he wasn’t and maybe he was,” she murmured. “Davey always did like playing with dolls.”

It must have been a very happy mixture in that glass, because the second blast of laughter was even louder than the first. “Playing with dolls,” she howled. “Get me!” and since the barstools weren’t equipped with rockers the admonition seemed a good idea. Rita teetered wildly but a large masculine shoulder blocked her backward descent—a shoulder that wasn’t Mitch’s and hadn’t been standing behind her a moment ago. The discovery had a sobering effect. She whirled about, and then her hilarity suffered sudden death.